Lynn Houston

Department of English
Arizona State University
lynnmhouston@yahoo.com

 

Pina Bausch, Carnations. Perf. Tanztheater Wuppertal. Gammage Auditorium, Tempe. 22 October 1999.

 

Freud’s elision of body-mind also suggests that the private mental space accorded to “the self” on modern models of identity, the space of fantasy, is produced to some extent by the body’s being-in-culture. Slavoj Zizek notes that “at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to others”… That is to say, our fantasies, those wonderful or terrifying stories we weave about ourselves in our supposedly most private moments, are actually extensions of culture into that space formerly and mistakenly called “mind.” Zizek argues that fantasy has a “radically intersubjective character” insofar as it is “an attempt to provide an answer to the question ‘What does society want from me,’ to unearth the meaning of the murky events in which I am forced to participate.”

 

–Sharon Crowley, Rhetorical Bodies, 362.

 

Billed as ballet, Pina Bausch’s work is a choreography that prompts audience members who expect the tutus and pirouettes typical of traditional ballet to leave the theater. Bausch brings a critical consciousness to choreography and to representations of the body, a consciousness which she then places in dialogue with the history of ballet. Her work is a postmodern art especially inspired, it seems, by forces at play in psychoanalysis and its attempts to formulate the subject. In the piece Carnations, performed recently in Tempe,¹ Bausch plays with the interaction between the stage and the audience, between the dancers and the spectators, so that the absence of traditional ballet and the audience’s expectations for it become the subjects of the ballet. Thus her piece becomes both a study in the violence of tradition and a commentary on the tradition of violence that pervades human interaction.
 
In Carnations, Bausch reveals a Borgesian sensitivity in her treatment of the uncanny that haunts the relationship between author and reader, and between performer and spectator, as she links the play of power in the gaze to other struggles for power in human relationships. In the refusal of her dancers to remain simply performers who exist just for the entertainment of the audience–Bausch’s dancers shout to us that their feet hurt–her art can be likened to Pirandello’s at its most surreal. Carnations powerfully brings into conjuction art, theory, and collective fantasy as it explores the struggle over institutional uses of power present in how we represent ourselves physically, expressionistically, gesturally, and in how we tell the stories that construct our subjectivity.
 
Bausch’s piece invokes moments in the history of psychoanalysis where the relationship between the patient and the psychoanalyst are critiqued, where the notions of cause and effect that support psycholanalytic discourse are examined and questioned, and where definitions of repression and the unconscious are advanced. Her piece resounds particularly strongly with the categories advanced by Lacan in “Function and field of speech and language,” the categories which he believes betray the amnesia of the unconscious, or, in other words, the spaces where the text of truth has been collected and stored. “The unconscious is that chapter of my history,” he states, “that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere….” (50). Bausch works with the categories proposed by Lacan that label spaces where the truth has been posited: the body, childhood memory, systems of signs, and tradition. She communicates with these categories, these cultural warehouses of truth, in order to excavate the idea of truth that must precede such a positioning, and in order to politicize the myth of the unconscious and of the “natural innocence” of humankind, as well as to show us the violence underlying–and masked by–these constructions.
 
As acknowledged in Sharon Crowley’s reading of Zizek (reading Lacan) found in the passage quoted at the beginning of this article, any notion of subjectivity must be rooted in a political economy of construction. Much contemporary theorizing about subjectivity dismisses the idea of a hidden “natural” self. It encourages, instead, the view that all ideas about subjectivity are always constructions, already constructions before we can even think of them, that these ideas are already built into a limited set of categories in which we can conceive of ourselves, and that they are the only tools with which we bring ourselves into being. These tools, these strategies of narration, which come from collective spaces, are already prescribed for us. Fantasy demythified can no longer exist as the realm of wild individualism, for it must be seen as a recognizable part of the textual structure readable by society. It is out of this dynamic, out of this search for the kernel of the self, that the fascination for fantasy comes. Bausch takes this dynamic apart at its seams, problematizing the categories recognizable to this system and satirizing the authoritative processes whereby deviation from the approved norms of this system of literacy is punished. Her piece presents fantasy as a springboard into something more dangerous, both as something imposed on us, and also as something that seems to respond to our search for an irreducible essence. It is here, in the way the structure of Carnations parallels the defense of the unconscious found in Lacan’s “Function and field of speech and language,” that Bausch’s work becomes politically relevant to postmodern ideas about the construction of subjectivity, for it is here that her departure from the tenets of earlier Lacanian psychoanalytic theory becomes most clear.

 

But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. Namely:–in monuments: this is my body… (Lacan 50)

 

Power, in Bausch’s Carnations, is examined in a variety of its incarnations. Her dance looks to the dynamics of the romantic relationship and to the context of food for the use of the body as a signifying medium. Bausch sees these as special situations in regard to manifestations of power. At one moment in the piece, for example, a man (like the referee in a boxing match) watches while sets of couples (representing relationships of varying nature) act out various forms of abuse on each other. The first set of couples says something to us about nature, human development, and repression. A woman comes out on stage with a bucket full of dirt and a pail and, while facing the audience with her eyes closed, begins spooning dirt on top of her head. Next, a man comes out on stage and, after spilling one pile of dirt on his own head, begins throwing dirt on top of the woman’s head. Finally the woman stops and begins running around the stage screaming (it is a primal sound). The referee comes to her and puts the microphone on her chest and we hear the sound of a heart beating. One of the other couples in this same sequence is constituted by a man and a woman (the heterosexual union). The woman in this couple runs from one side of the stage to the other side trying to escape the man. The man runs after her and each time he catches up he jumps on her back violently. The couple freezes and the referee puts a microphone to each of their chests. Since we hear the sound of a heart beating each time, it is possible that we are to note that this is not “art” (que “ceci n’est pas une pipe”) but that this is “reality.”
 
A later instance explores the sometimes mundane forms of power in the heterosexual relationship. A man stands next to a woman who is facing the audience. Her eyes are closed. The man is trying to force her to eat an orange that she doesn’t want to eat. He continues to try to persuade her, slice by slice, to eat the whole orange. She protests and then acquiesces each time. We do not know of any other objective, any other intention to his wanting her to eat the orange other than just to get her to do it. He counters her protests with a trite response, telling her that it is good for her. In not offering any other reason than this, Bausch plays with the habitual, with the rituals of custom, with practices for which we no longer remember the justification, traditions which are based on reasons we have forgotten, based on world-views that may no longer be relevant. We don’t know why we do it, we just know that we are supposed to do it. Bausch makes us wonder about the relationship of food and the body to the natural.
 
In the above situation, the statement made by Slavoj Zizek at the very beginning of this article would seem to speak about the violence done through fantasy (as infused and reproduced by tradition or that to which we are “accustomed”) not only to the “ideal” space of subjectivity, but also to the body of the subject herself, in these “murky events in which [she is] forced to participate.” While the intricacies of Bausch’s choreography suggest that appeals to nature are fruitless, since even what we perceive as nature, even the category “nature” itself, can only ever be a contrivance, in such a way that the act of naturalizing becomes too dangerously steeped in the forces of politics not to create in us the necessity of being aware of this history. While all of this is present in Bausch’s work, at the same time, in a move which mustn’t be read as doing that which she cautions us against, she reminds us that any theory, any art, must account for the body.

 

But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. Namely:–in archival documents: these are my childhood memories… (Lacan 50)

 

Many of the scenes in Carnations deal, at least on some level, with how childhood and adulthood coexist but yet remain somehow foreign to each other. Childhood, in being associated with a “natural” state, serves as that which has been erased in order to make way for the civilized being that is, supposedly, the adult. Here we have a tension between nature and civilization, or between the natural environment and industrialization, or, yet, in Blakean terms, between innocence and experience. Childhood, in being that which must give way to progress, is the realm of repression, and hence it is the past from which future fantasies will, supposedly, arise. At the climax of the dance, the Fall of mankind is reenacted amid chaos and confusion, amid the trampling of the flowers that filled the stage floor. But it possesses no transcendent significance. It is not the corruption of what used to be pure, but it is simply one among many of the violent breeches, of our glimpses into the horror of the pre-arrangement of form, into our inextricability from the Symbolic and the abuses it engenders. Carnations undoes the notion that violence is somehow a quality of a fallen world and points instead to nature and purity as that which has been constructed.
 
In this scenario, then, childhood is a period much like the space of the unconscious itself: “that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter….” (Lacan 50). Repression and truth, here, are positioned in relation to one another in Bausch’s supposed affirmation of the existence of the unconscious, but not in the way that either Freud or the early Lacan meant it to exist. It exists, according to Bausch, because we are not conscious of how others have constructed not only ourselves but also our own memories of who we were in our “natural state” of childhood. This phantasmatic place must exist, she would add, as the space to which our awareness of the violence in which we participate has fled. Bausch’s representation of this tendency toward blindness, or refusals to see, is what puts her in tension with the psychoanalytic tradition, among others, in a way that echoes Nietzsche’s dismantling of the transcendental in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”: “Truths are illusions about which we have forgotten they are illusions” (81).
 
In one scene in Carnations, the dancers, now seemingly children, are playing a child’s game called “Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil.”² The oppressive power-structure of the game lends itself easily to a clear perception of the tremendous amount of yelling and abuse occurring among the children. Quite suddenly, one of the dancers emerges from the back of the stage and takes the position of mother. She is twice as tall as the others and her body is ill-proportioned: she has an elongated lower body and a small upper body. When she appears the violence becomes worse, as the child who had been abusing the other children now becomes the target for the mother’s wrath. The mother also figures as a malevolent Alice-in-Wonderland, a reference made plain not only by her elongated figure but also by her costume: long blond hair and blue dress.³
 
At the end of her piece, Bausch introduces confessional narrative into the performance. The dancers enter holding their arms above their heads in an arc, in what is perhaps the most easily recognizable stance of traditional ballet, and they begin to tell us stories about incidents in their childhood that made them want to become dancers. The dancers recount their subject-formation as non-traditional ballet dancers while performing the central gesture of traditional ballet. Here, in the making public of the private space of childhood recollection, Bausch’s piece seems again to take up the question of the coherent self and of the inability to posit the cause-and-effect relationship between childhood and adulthood that audiences seem to expect. Here, Bausch seems to come full circle by positing an incomprehensibility against which any enterprise rooted in language must struggles. She seems almost to invoke Hélène Cixous, who talks about the instability of stages of identity: “at the same time we are all the ages, those we have been, those we will be, those we will not be, we journey through ourselves… as the child who goes snivelling to school and as the broken old man… We: are (untranslatable). Without counting all the combinations with others, our exchanges between languages, between sexes….” (“Preface” to the Hélène Cixous Reader, xvii-xviii).

 

But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. Namely:–in semantic evolution; this corresponds to the stock of words and acceptations of my own particular vocabulary, as it does to my style of life and to my character… (Lacan 50)

 

Signs in Bausch’s Carnations enter into a relationship with the body in its potential as sign-maker or sign-producer, as in her use of sign language as dance. One of the first scenes in Carnations is that of a man signing the words to the song written by George Gershwin entitled “The Man I Love,” while at the same time the recording of this song made by Ella Fitzgerald is played. Associations with childhood scenes in the rest of the piece and with psychoanalysis create an impression of a homosexual fantasy of ideal love, or of the ideal partner-subject, at the same time that it denotes a sort of pre-verbality or inability to articulate the message in speech.
 
Bausch’s flowers, her pastel colors and twirling men, represent a narrative realm of the fantastical that in its apparent playfulness, its jouissance, permits the exploration of more dangerous, more violent themes. Lacan’s jouissance surrenders to violence so that what was once playfulness becomes grotesque, what was a masculinist aesthetic of play, of jocularity, becomes dangerous. In Bausch’s passport scenes (twice a man steps on stage to ask one of the dancers for his passport: “your passport, please”), what underlies the question of otherness, the command to demonstrate legitimacy as a subject, is an accusation of otherness whose impact on the life of the subject is displayed well by the dancers in their apparent gestures of dejection: moving slowly, looking back, they wait for a signal that would remove the imperative, but it never comes. In the second passport scene we are shown how this pre-scribed punishment is, in fact, carried out in the power to humiliate. In this scene the official makes the man do tricks like a dog, like a sub-human. He even has the commands translated by a bystander into the man’s own language, in an effort to assure that the man know and understand as fully as possible his own degradation.
 
Both passport scenes target men who are wearing dresses. It is certainly not a coincidence that these figures have been pointed out as not belonging, that an aspect of their subjectivity has caused them to come into suspicion, to be questioned. The question/command of authority marks an ideology that wishes to punish difference, wishes to identify it and humiliate it, and which includes the idea of difference, of not “amounting” (it “tarries with the negative,” if you will) in the very elaboration of itself as a system. It is by this process of conditioning that ideology reproduces itself, and it is in conceiving of this process as a passing of what is outside the self into the inside of the self that Lacan finds his idea for the birth of the subject, what he calls the mirror stage. What many Lacanians wish to argue is that Lacan does away with the Freudian conception of an interior being that gets projected outward and that Lacan prefers to view this process of subject formation as an internalization of a public conception of identity.

 

But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. Namely:–in traditions, too, and even in the legends which, in a heroicized form, bear my history… (Lacan 50)

 

Bausch’s Carnations, in questioning the genre of classical ballet, asks us to consider what enjoyment the dancer is supposed to have in presenting the piece for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Bausch’s dancers tell us their feet hurt, that if we want to see grand-jetés we can do them ourselves. We are not presented with the transcendental subject of classical ballet (except in shadowy profile when Bausch takes an opportunity to mock this tradition of dance). Bausch’s piece also asks us to consider what fun the audience is supposed to have in attending the ballet. How is it, she seems to ask, that the bodies of the audience are completely forgotten, that in being asked to watch the art of dance, the audience members are asked to forget themselves, their own bodies? Bausch proposes to resolve this dilemma at the same time she makes us aware of it. When her dancers ask the audience to stand up and perform a simple dance that includes four arm movements, we suddenly realize that we are making the motion of a hug around the space where a body should be, and the dancers then encourage us to give hugs to those around us. It is in this way that the body of the audience member is reinscribed into the performance.
 
Pina Bausch might, in fact, be seen as acting as a sort of therapist to her ballet audience in counseling us to rid ourselves of our expectations about what ballet should be. She prompts her audience to conclude that when we are confronted with art that doesn’t function as we think it should, the problem isn’t with the art but with our expectations, with the way we think about the art. In underscoring the humanity, the mortality of her dancers, Bausch’s art offers itself, then, not to mere enjoyment of beautiful forms, but to political reflection through a perception which no longer originates from the carefree attitude of a ballet-goer out for a night on the town, which no longer originates from the comfort of theater seats, but from a reversal of the gaze, from a space where the dancer becomes the one who watches and the erstwhile spectator becomes the spectacle. It is in this reversal that the truth in Bausch’s art can be found. By invoking fantasy (or the Imaginary) and playfulness (innocence, her field of one thousand carnations) in order to explore patterns of cruelty and subjection, her dance troupe, the Tanztheater Wuppertal, demythifies the fantasy of innocence, the collective cultural fantasy by which we wish to posit claims of a natural state, and thereby persists in reproducing the violence of the social.

 

 Notes

 

1. Carnations was originally performed in 1982. Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal made Arizona State University’s Gammage Auditorium one of the few stops on their Fall 1999 United States tour. A schedule of their upcoming performances can be consulted under the heading “spielplan” at the dance troupe’s homepage <www.pina-bausch.de>.

 

2. In this game the person who is “it” stands with his or her back to the group of children and turns around quickly after yelling the phrase, “un, deux, trois, soleil.” The other children have up until the time the one who is “it” turns around in order to sneak up on him or her. If one of the children is able to touch the person who is “it” before he or she turns around, then there is a winner, and the winner of the game becomes the next person to be “it.” If the child who is “it” sees any of the children moving when he or she turns around, then the child who was caught moving is sent back to the starting line and must begin again advancing on the one who is “it.”

 

3. This Bad Alice may also be a reference to the work of Luce Irigaray. Although Pina Bausch is not solely feminist in her agenda, her feminism cannot be mistaken in the context of the present discussion as a clin d’oeil in the direction of Irigaray, a pupil of Jacques Lacan whom he repudiated because of her feminist approach to psychoanalysis. One of her most famous re-readings of psychoanalysis, a feminist appropriation of Lacan’s idea of the mirror-stage, is “The Looking Glass, from the Other Side.”
 

Works Cited

 

• Cixous, Hélène. The Hélène Cixous Reader. Ed. Susan Sellers. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Crowley, Sharon and Jack Selzer, eds. Rhetorical Bodies. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25.2 (1995): 9-63.
• —. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume 1. 1978. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1890s. Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1979.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
• —. Tarrying With The Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.
• —. The Zizek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.