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The Theatricality of the Punctum: Re-Viewing Camera Lucida

Harry Wilson at University of Glasgow

Abstract and Figures

I first encountered Roland Barthes�s Camera Lucida�(1980) in 2012 when I was developing a performance on falling and photography. Since then I have re-encountered Barthes�s book annually as part of my practice-as-research PhD project on the relationships between performance and photography. This research project seeks to make performance work in response to Barthes�s book � to practice with Barthes in an exploration of theatricality, materiality and affect. This photo-essay weaves critical discourse with performance documentation to explore my relationship to Barthes�s book. Responding to Michael Fried�s claim that Barthes�s Camera Lucida is an exercise in �antitheatrical critical thought� (Fried 2008, 98) the essay seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. Specifically, by exploring Barthes�s conceptualisation of the pose I discuss how performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes�s text. Additionally, I argue for Barthes�s book as an example of philosophy as performance and for my own work as an instance of performance philosophy.

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PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017):266 -284

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31126

ISSN 2057-7176

THE THEATRICALITY OF THE

PUNCTUM

:

RE- VIEWING ROLAND BARTHES'

CAMERA LUCIDA

HARRY ROBERT WILSON UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Introduction —Roland Barthes and I

Thus it would be wrong to say that if we undertake to reread the text we do so for

some intellectual advantage (to understand better, to analyze on good grounds): it

is actually and invariably for a ludic advantage: to multiply the signifiers, not to reach

some ultimate signified.

Barthes (1990) , 165

It was in 2012, whilst developing a performance about falling, that I was first introduced to Roland

Barthes' concept of the punctum : the emotionally bruising, affective detail of a photograph that

breaks through the field of signification (studium ) to prick or wound the viewer. I was researching

photographs of bodies caught in the act of falling when I came across Andrea Fitzpatrick's

compelling article on art after 9/11. Fitzpatrick (2007) adopts Barthes' dual terms of studium and

punctum to analyse the 'movement of vulnerability' in Richard Drew's controversial Falling Man

photograph, which depicts a man leaping from the World Trade Center . Through a comparison

with Yves Klein's Leap Into the Void (1960) Fitzpatrick manages to explore a crisis of subjectivity and

the rupture of meaning in images of falling (85–86).

The concept of the punctum appears in Barthes' last book La Chambre Claire: Note sur la

photographie (1980) (translated into English by Richard Howard as Camera Lucida: Reflections on

Photography [1981 ]). What initially struck me about this book was Barthes' exploration of his theory

of photography's affect in the autobiographical reflections on the death of his mother and his

search for her in a pile of old photographs. As I read the book for the first time, I felt like Barthes

was articulating the pain I felt when looking at pictures of my own mother, who died when I was

14. D rawing on Fitzpatrick's article and responding to Barthes' mournful reflections in Camera

Lucida, I developed a performance lecture, The Punctum, that weaved together an introduction to

Barthes' photographic theory; a series of live staged falls; and a photograph of my mother to stand

in for Barthes' absent Winter Garden Photograph.

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Figure 1: 'The Punctum a lecture performance on falling and photography…'. Image credit: Beth Savage.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017)

Since this first encounter with Barthes' punctum , it started to surface everywhere in my subsequent

reading on theatre and performance. Of course, Barthes' term appears in performance books that

deal specifically with photography such as Peggy Phelan's Unmarked (1994), Rebecca Schneider's

Performing Remains (2011), Dominic Johnson's Theatre & The Visual (2012), and Joel Anderson's

Theatre & Photography (2015). However, I have been more interested in work that has transposed

Barthes' concept of the punctum directly onto the experience of watching live theatre and

performance (see Bottoms 1999, 2007; Bleeker 2008; Duggan 2012). In these instances, the

punctum's affects in performance often seem to occur when the 'reality' of live bodies draw

attention to their material presence in a way that breaks the field of representation. There is

sometimes something missing in these transpositions, however. As if the act of applying Barthes'

term loses something in the process of naming (as Barthes himself writes, on attempting to locate

the punctum , 'what I can name cannot really prick me' [Barthes 1993, 51]). A more suitable response

to theorising the punctum 's unspeakable affects as they relate to theatre and performance might

then be to investigate them through an embodied performance practice.

My research project for the last two and a half years has been to explore Barthes' Camera Lucida

as a set of implicit instructions for making performance. This project has necessitated a series of

iterative re-readings of the text, whereby I return to Camera Lucida at the start of each stage of

devising. As Barthes writes in the quotation from S/Z that heads this essay, this process of re-

reading has not facilitated a better understanding of his work (per se ) but it has allowed its signifiers

to multiply (as each re-reading further complicates Barthes' dense text). This has culminated so far

in two performances made in response to Barthes' book with a third practical project planned for

2017. This process, of devising performance in response to Barthes' book, has intensified the

proliferation of Camera Lucida's 'meanings'.

In Kate Briggs' article "Practising with Roland Barthes" she reflects on the task of translating

Barthes' lecture course The Preparation of the Novel and argues for translation as a 'productive

practice' that 'is its own way of doing research, of arriving at new knowledge of the work in

question: knowledge that springs from the translator's speculative inquiry into the manner of its

making' (Briggs 2015, 128–129). My research is, in a similar way to Briggs, an experiment in

practising with Barthes: where with suggests not only a kind of application of theory (and perhaps

not even this) but a collaboration alongside him. Roland Barthes and I are exploring Camera Lucida

as it relates to performance practice. Although, my own speculative inquiry is not the attempt to

translate Camera Lucida into performance, as such, but perhaps, following Matthew Goulish, a

version of creative response which 'proliferates', 'multiplies out' from 'miraculous (exceptional,

inspiring, unusual, transcendent, or otherwise engaging) moment[s]' that I encounter in Barthes'

text (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 211). Thus, my practice attempts to explore the importance of

Barthes' work to theatre and performance studies, whilst also exploring what theatre and

performance does to Camera Lucida : how it transforms the text, arrives at new knowledge, offers

new perspectives (multiplies its signifiers).

Perhaps this focus on Camera Lucida's 'miraculous moments' has something in common with

Barthes' concept of pathetic criticism—where a reader approaches a work through its affective or

powerful moments of pathos. In The Preparation of the Novel Barthes writes that pathetic criticism

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Figure 2: 'posing with Camera Lucida …'

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could eschew (the novel's) logical units in favour of the 'power of its moments' and that this would

re-construct works based on their affective meaning. Barthes continues:

I know there are pathetic elements in Monte-Cristo from which I could re-construct

the whole work... presuming we'd be willing to devalue the work, to not respect the

Whole, to do away with parts of that work, to ruin it… in order to make it live.

(Barthes 2011, 108)

In my re-reading(s) of Camera Lucida , I have attempted to respond to the book's affective moments

in order to re-construct it in the form of performance. Barthes' writing encourages this approach:

often, he uses language to evoke a particular kind of affective space, where the text can be

encountered through a series of pathetic moments. Interestingly, in The Preparation of the Novel ,

Barthes manages to identify pathetic criticism as a mode of reading and then adapt it into a

practice of writing. I hope to do something similar in my practice: to develop performances that

encourage the audience to approach them based on the affective power of their moments.

Specifically, my annual re-encounter with Barthes' rich text, and my performance responses

to it, have currently led me to hone in on ideas of theatricality in the book. This writing seeks

to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida . By

exploring Barthes' concept ualisation of the pose I will discuss how my own performance

practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in

Barthes' text. Additionally, I will argue for Barthes' book as an example of philosophy as

performance and for the ways in which pensiveness in performance practice might be

explored as a mode of performance philosophy.

Part One: Textual Poses

According to Michael Fried, Barthes' Camera Lucida is an exercise in ' antitheatrical critical thought'

(Fried 2008, 98). Fried's reading of Camera Lucida centres on Barthes' descriptions of the accidental

nature of the punctum, a detail that is 'not, or at least not strictly, intentional' (Barthes 1993, 47).

Fried develops this claim to argue that if the photographer's intentions are too easily discernible in

a photograph, it becomes artificial and loses its affective force. In other words, if the photograph

'shows itself being seen' it displays an artificiality, a theatricality that must be overcome (Fried

2008).

It is true that Barthes treats theatricality and artifice with suspicion in Camera Lucida . The book is

a search for an 'authentic' encounter with the 'essence' of his mother through photographs of her.

He celebrates his mother's ability to be photographed 'without either showing or hiding herself'

avoiding 'the tense theatricalism' of the pose (Barthes 1993, 67, 69). This is a theatricalism that

transforms a subject into an image, a process that Barthes himself cannot avoid when being

photographed ('I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I wa nt you to know that

I am posing' (Barthes 1993, 11) and later; 'each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I

invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity' (Barthes 1993, 13)). Whilst this suggests that

Barthes should dislike the frontal pose of portrait photography (due to its inherent theatricality)

instead he argues that the power of the photograph is 'of looking me straight in the eye ' (Barthes

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Figure 3: 'the portrait's inherent theatricality…'

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1993, 111). Barthes desires a frontal pose that separates the subject's 'attention' from the

beholder's 'perception': in other words, the viewer may perceive something in the subject's look

that is entirely subjective (Barthes 1993, 111). This, according to Michael Fried, is how the

photograph avoids theatricality. Fried argues that the punctum functions as a guarantee of

antitheatricality: the non-intentional, accidental detail and th e photographed subject's

'authenticity'; the naïve non-p erformance of a pose (Fried 2008, 102, 109–111). As a result, Fried

writes, Barthes' fascination with photography is borne from its ability to ' overcom[e] theatre in and

through the punctum ' (Fried 2008, 111).

Since Plato this derogatory coupling of artifice and theatricality has been well rehearsed in the

antitheatrical traditions of Western thought and in Fried's earlier discussions of theatre's

degenerative effect on art (see Fried 1967). Yet Camera Lucida' s supposed 'antitheatricalism' is

contradicted by Barthes' earlier writing on theatre: in particular, Barthes' essay on Baudelaire's

theatre, from 1954. In this essay, Barthes desires bodies that are 'touched… by the grace of the

artificial' (Barthes 1972, 28). Barthes is searching for a powerful theatricality, a 'radiant perception

of matter, amassed, condensed as though on stage' (Barthes 1972, 28). Ironically, Barthes does not

find this theatricality in Baudelaire's plays but, rather, it 'explodes… wherever we do not expect it'

in Baudelaire's other writing (Barthes 1972, 28). For Barthes, Baudelaire's theatre is so concerned

with hiding its artifice (in order to present fully-formed fictional worlds) that it loses its potency. In

fact, in this essay, Barthes has no time for art without 'sensuous artifice', arguing that theatricality

must be protected, must 'seek refuge' from the 'petit bourgeois sensibilit[ies]' of the 19th century

stage (Barthes 1972, 26, 30–31).

While Barthes' essay on Baudelaire was written over 25 years earlier than Camera Lucida (and the

powerful affect of theatricality is distinct from his concept of the punctum ) they both share a

concern with the 'disturbing corporeality' of bodies and their dual position as both absent and

present (Barthes 1972, 27–28). As Timothy Scheie argues, in his excellent book Performance Degree

Zero, Barthes' decision to abandon critical writing on the theatre after 1960 is nevertheless replaced

by the 'figurative and textual theatre[s]' of his later writings (Scheie 2006, 63). So while the literal

live performing body is absent from Barthes' later works, he is fascinated with the body's 'elusive

double… neither living nor dead, neither present nor past' (Scheie 2006, 19). This is echoed in

Rebecca Schneider's claims that Camera Lucida is actually an exploration of the theatricality of

photography. Referencing Barthes' conception of photographic presence as deferral, she writes

that 'by turning the evidentiary claim that "X is here before the camera" into a winking clone of "X

is dead"… lies photography's essential theatricality—it both is, and is not' (Schneider 2011, 143).

The idea of the body's theatrical double is reflected in Barthes' writing style. Although Barthes' ideal

photograph may be one that 'overcomes' theatre in order to arrest the viewer with an 'authentic'

encounter, on re-viewing Camera Lucida , it is possible to discern the graceful artifice of theatricality

in Barthes' writing . The narrator of Camera Lucida is aware of being read: he poses for the reader.

As Scheie has argued, Barthes' last book shares similarities with his unconventional autobiography

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes where he instructs the reader to consider the text 'as if spoken by

a character in a novel' (Barthes 1977, 2). Similarly, Scheie writes that Camera Lucida is 'distinctly

theatrical' in its deliberate and methodical reasoning (Scheie 2010, 170–71). There is also

theatricality in the way that the book continually draws attention to its novelistic form. This is

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Figure 4: 'he transforms himself in advance into an image…'

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017)

captured in Barthes' first line (' One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of

Napoleon's youngest brother' [Barthes 1993, 3]) but also recurs throughout part two of the book,

where Barthes evocatively describes the mise-en-scè ne of his encounter with the Winter Garden

Photograph: 'there I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of

my mother, one by one, under the lamp light, gradually moving back in time with her' (Barthes

1993, 67). Margaret Olin, Geoffrey Batchen and Jean-Michel Rabaté have all highlighted Camera

Lucida's form as somewhere between the theoretical text and autobiographical novel (see Batchen

2009 and Rabaté 1997). At times Barthes poses as the Proustian narrator, at other times as the

semiotician in search of a new language (or a 'kind of philosophical detective' (Batchen 2009, 10)).

Beryl Schlossman takes the theatrical metaphor of Barthes' posing further by arguing that the

luxury and artifice of his writing stages a 'theatre of subjectivity' (Rabaté 1997, 146). In this sense

Barthes is practising the kind of performance of self that he describes in the photographic pose

where he 'transform[s himself] in advance into an image' (Barthes 1993, 10).

We could also say that as well as the textual posing of Camera Lucida being theatrical, the book is

also performative (in the Austinian sense that the words perform actions). Barthes' descriptions of

the punctum bring about punctum -like effects. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bar thes'

descriptions of the Winter Garden Photograph. He decides to omit this image of his mother as a

child arguing that 'it exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture… for

you no wound' (Barthes 1993, 73). Yet, in his ekphrastic descriptions of the image, he invites the

reader to invest it with their own punctum. For me, I fill the space left by the Winter Garden

Photograph with an image of my own mother as a child. In this sense, it could be said that the book

is an example of philosophy as performance: it performs thinking and practices its theories

through writing. In its efforts to describe the affective force of photography, Barthes' book creates

an affective encounter between writer and reader. To return to the quotation from S/Z that starts

this essay, the 'ludic advantage' of re-reading Camera Lucida (its playful pleasure) is that Barthes'

writing arrests the reader, it pricks us, bruises us through the perception of a 'sensuous artifice'. In

other words, Barthes' writing explores the theatricality of the punctum in the theatrical split

between Barthes and the narrator of Camera Lucida .

As Jean-Michel Rabaté argues: Camera Lucida is ' a novel about Barthes' mother's death, [that] is

also a theoretical piece documenting the impossibility of writing a novel about the mother's death'

(Rabaté 1997, 8). It is this dedication to a praxis of writing that is often present in Barthes' later

works, from The Pleasure of the Text (1975) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) to A Lover's

Discourse (1977), but it is perhaps most clearly articulated by Barthes in his lecture course on The

Neutral at the Collège de France in 1978. The structuring of these lectures, around a randomly

ordered series of 30 'figures', clearly takes inspiration from John Cage's aleatory practices in

composition. As Barthes himself notes: 'the sequence of fragments… would put "something" (the

subject, the Neutral?) in a state of continuous flux… relation to contemporary music, where the

"contents" of forms matter less than their circulation' (Barthes 2005, 10). In this example , Barthes

explores the self-proclaimed role of the 'intellectual as artist' (Barthes 2005, 17) that resembles

Laura Cull's arguments for the performance art credentials of Henri Bergson in her definition of

performance philosophy (Cull 2012, 24). Barthes continues these experiments in form in Camera

Lucida, exploring a theatre of subjectivity in his playful performance of thinking.

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Figure 5: 'I fill the space left by the Winter Garden Photograph with an image of my own mother as a child…'

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Part Two: Posing with Camera Lucida

Given Barthes' focus on the pose in his discussions of photography (and Camera Lucida's textual

posing discussed above) I would like to discuss an instance of posing from my most recent

performance made in response to Barthes' book—Kairos .1 In the light of Fried's arguments—that

photography must escape the inherent theatricality of the pose—what are the implications of

staging the pose in theatre: to re- theatricalise it in the affective space of live performance? How

might this offer a re-viewing of Barthes' suspicion of theatrical posing?

Taking direct inspiration from Barthes' idea of pathetic criticism; for Kairos I developed 12

fragmentary performance 'moments' based around a series of conceptual terms derived in

response to Camera Lucida. These were titled: absence; air; desire; ecstasy; fragment; grain; haiku;

intractable; kairos; mother; pose; unspeakable. The material (lasting roughly 1 hour) was

performed four times over the course of four hours (to mirror the 48 sections of Barthes' book)

and the audience were welcome to enter the space at any time and leave at any time (encouraging

a mode of spectatorship that did not respect the whole). Each of these sequences were performed

in a random order dictated by the shuffling of 35mm slides in an old slide projector—which

projected the titles of the sections onto a blank notebook. I started the performance dressed in a

similar outfit to Robert Wilson in Mapplethorpe's portrait of Wilson and Philip Glass (1976) and with

each repetition I shed layers of clothing until the last sequence was performed fully naked. This

structure created the possibility of viewing each section more than once: each time in a different

context, with my body in increasing states of undress and exhaustion. As such each 'repetition' of

the sequence aimed to be a variation due to the changing sequence of the material, the effects of

tiredness on my body and the shifting make-up of the audience in the space.

The material I developed in response to these titles ranged from choreographed movement, to

text and task-based actions. At times I attempted to create material based on my existing

understanding of the terms (so 'grain' became an exploration of the material textures of the voice,

or 'air' explored the specific aura of a face); at other times there was a more literal response to the

word in the title (so for 'haiku' I read a series of haiku poems, and 'unspeakable' I sat in silence for

a moment). I hoped, however, that the surface-level literalness of some of the sections was

complicated by the shifting order and context in which they were performed, as well as by the non-

narrative, task-based nature of the piece.

During the 'pose' section of the performance I performed a movement sequence of stilled poses

drawn from photographs from Camera Lucida and other images that have entered into the

research process.2 The individual poses, all situated around a wooden chair, were combined to

fluidly transition from one position to the next. While this created the effect of a 'movement'

sequence, I attempted to hold each pose for a significant amount of time so that the 'stillness' of it

would register. To stage the still pose in performance immediately complicates the notion of

stillness. As André Lep ecki has discussed in relation to dance: 'the still- act does not entail rigidity

or morbidity it requires a performance of suspension' (Lepecki 2006, 15). The still-act explores a

tension between movement and stasis and as Rebecca Schneider observes: the often reinforced

oppositions between moving and still, living and dead, theatre and photography are worth

challenging. Problematising Barthes' conflation of theatre and photography with death, she writes

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Figure 6: 'the still-act does not entail rigidity or morbidity it requires a performance of suspension…'

Image credit: Beth Chalmers.

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that ' photography and performance share […] the rowdier processional or street theatre legacy of

theatrical irruption—instability, repetition, the ambulant freeze, the by -pass... the shared pre- and

re-enactment of tableaux vivants, or living stills' (Schneider 2011, 144). What Schneider is

addressing here is the tendency to think of photography as a 'violent stilling'—the death of theatre's

liveness—and she counters this in the compounding of ambulant and freeze, living and still, theatre

and photography. In Kairos , placing the still poses 'in time', as temporary tableaux vivants —in what

Schneider might call an ambulant freeze—invokes the liveness of the photographic pose, and its

theatricality, in another medium.

These poses were inherently citational—in that they were re-enactments of the 'original'

photographs. The section also referenced other moments of the performance as the pose

sequence was looped three times and performed a total of four times throughout the piece. In this

sense, the poses explored what Schneider terms the 'theatricality of time' in that they called

backward and forward to their citational references (Schneider 2011, 6). Inspired by Barthes' desire

for the frontal pose of portrait photography, I 'delivered' each pose to an individual audience

member, making eye contact with them as if their eyes were imaginary cameras. In these moments

of eye contact, I attempted to keep my facial expression as neutral as possible in order to explore

Barthes' split between attention and perception discussed above. However, these moments could

be described as encounters with the theatricality of the pose, in the terms discussed by Maaike

Bleeker, as my actions in this moment, drew attention to the act of looking and made the 'seer

aware of his or her position relative to the work' (Bleeker 2008, 34). There were also times when

this reciprocal gaze, between myself and the audience member, provoked a shared smile; breaking

the neutrality of my expression and highlighting our co-presence in the shared space and time of

the performance. Far from Barthes' split between the look of the subject in a photograph and the

beholder's perception, there was instead a shared encounter in the here and now of performance.

After the first loop of movements, I turned the chair to the back of the space and delivered the

sequence of poses facing away from the audience. If the direct eye contact drew the audience's

attention to the act of looking, I hoped that this playful reversal of the poses might encourage a

consideration of the viewer's privileged position of distance. The theatricality of the distant body is

explored by Barthes in his description of a drag performance at a Parisian nightclub. He argues

that there is an intoxicating theatricality in the 'totally desirable and absolutely inaccessible' body

that is 'seen from a distance in the full light of the stage' (Barthes 1976, 128). Whether my facial

expressions were neutral or not (and whether I was facing the front or the back of the space) there

is no denying that in the last cycle of poses, my naked body (showing itself in the full light of the

stage) added a provocative theatricality to the sequence. The body, re-enacting poses with utility,

was made double by references to vulnerable/desirable/ abstract/tortured/male/female bodies.

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Figure 7: 'I turned the chair to the back of the space and delivered the sequence of poses facing

away from the audience…' Image credit: Julia Bauer.

Figure 8: 'references to vulnerable/desirable/abstract/tortured/male/female bodies…' Image credit: Julia Bauer.

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Pensive Performance: A Conclusion in Suspense

I have tried to explore the ways that theatricality figures in Camera Lucida through the concept of

the pose and my own embodied encounter with Barthes' text. Camera Lucida explore s a theatrical

kind of textual posing th at contradicts Fried's placement of Barthes' text within the tradition of

antitheatrical critical thought. Furthermore, if Barthes' book is re - viewed in the context of his earlier

writing, then it is possible to make a link between the graceful artifice of theatricality and the dual

posture of the photographic referent (as argued by Scheie and Schneider). To stage the pose in

performance, as I explored in Kairos , highlights its citationality and the tensions between stillness

and movement, intimacy and distance, and the provocative theatricality of bodies in the live

encounter.

One audience member who saw Kairos commented that the slow and methodical task-based

progression of the piece created a kind of pensive mood in the performance. Perhaps focusing in

on the pensiveness of performance, through Barthes, can contribute to discussions of how

performance thinks. It is possible to explore pensiveness in Camera Lucida by returning to Barthes'

split between attention and perception. Referring to two of André Kertész's photographs, Barthes

asks of the first (of Piet Mondrian in his studio [1926]) 'how can one have an intelligent air without

thinking about anything intelligent?' (Barthes 1993, 111–113). In the second, of a boy holding a

puppy (1928), Barthes describes a 'lacerating pensiveness' of the boy's face even though 'he is

looking at nothing' (Barthes 1993, 113). In other words, Barthes celebrates a fissure between the

posing subject's attention (or intention) and the beholder's interpretation of their expression.

Barthes' description of this as a 'pensiveness' in the image of the boy illuminates his earlier claim

that the photograph is subversive 'when it is pensive, when it thinks' (Barthes 1993, 38).

In S/Z, his in- depth analysis of Balzac's short-story Sarrasine , Barthes discusses the notion of the

pensive text. Quoting the last line of the story: 'and the Marquise remained pensive' (Balzac in

Barthes 1990, 216) Barthes argues that by concluding the story with the Marquise deep in thought,

the reader is left in a state of suspension: not knowing anything about what she is thinking. The

Marquise's pensiveness at the end of Sarrasine offers an 'infinite openness' for Barthes, where

meaning is kept 'free and signifying' (Barthes 1990, 216). Perhaps pensive performance might

similarly suspend meaning in the act of thinking. This is what Barthes loves about Kertész's images

of Mondrian and the boy: they create a zero degree, a neutral space of interpretation: 'if only

photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing… my body

never finds its zero degree' (Barthes 1993, 12).

Whilst the theatrical body rarely (if ever) offers up 'a body which signifies nothing', there are some

contemporary performance practices where a kind of ambivalent approach to character could

have a similar effect to Barthes' pensive subject (in that they keep meaning 'free and signifying').

Ex- Goat Island performer Karen Christopher has written on the company's performance style

noting that 'when I play a character I play a series of gestures and sounds… what we do is task-

based and we do not "pretend"' (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 84). The result of this task-based

approach to character is what Stephen Bottoms terms the company's affective/affectless

dramaturgies. When discussing a movement sequence from the company's 1996 performance

How Dear Me to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, Bottoms argues that the performers exude a kind

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of 'anti-presence' which suspends meaning, where 'the use of a deliberately blank, unemotional

facial glazing, means that there is no sense of these movements offering outward expressions of

inner selves' (Bottoms 1999, 425). Goat Island's performance style explores a pensiveness similar

to that described in Barthes' description of Mondrian's portrait—where there is a split between

attention and perception. However, this pensiveness is not without its theatricality. Christopher

describes a theatrical 'multi- vocality' in her approach to character when she writes that:

it is a specific thing I do when I complicate myself with more than one voice. Like a

series of transparencies sliding over each other, we are trying to enact a kind of

simultaneity of being. I am neither a representation of [the character], nor am I

solely myself. (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 84)

Perhaps, then, the punctum can be re-theatricalised through an exploration of the pensive in

performance. By approaching performance through a play of presence and anti-presence, affect

and affectlessness, character and self, it is possible to explore performance's zero degree: an

affective theatricality that suspends meaning. Perhaps pensiveness in performance might be

described as a mode of performance philosophy: a pensive performance is a performance that

thinks, and in the act of thinking suspends meaning. In this sense, it may be close to what Laura

Cull terms 'performance as thinking' in an exploration of performance's philosophical modes,

where she argues for 'an embodied encounter with the resistant materiality of performance's

thinking' (Cull 2012, 12). The punctum in performance, then, might be thought of as a kind of

theatricalised pensiveness that stages an encounter with performance's thinking. The inherent

theatricality of the pose is an apt space in which to explore this pensiveness: in the suspension of

movement, of subject and of meaning.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017)

Figure 9: 'with the Marquise deep in thought, the reader is left in a state of suspension: not knowing anything

about what she is thinking…' Image credit: Julia Bauer.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017)

1 Kairos was originally made for Buzzcut Festival in Glasgow in April 2016 and was subsequently performed at

Outskirts Festival at Platform in Easterhouse (April 2016) and at Live Art Bistro in Leeds (June 2016).

2 The photographs that I developed poses from were—from Camera Lucida : James Van der Zee's Family Portrait

(1926); Alexander Gardner's Portrait of Lewis Payne (1865); Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait (1975); Robert

Mapplethorpe's Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (1976). The other photographs included an image of one of the Abu

Ghraib prisoners that Rebecca Schneider discusses in Performing Remains (2011) and the image of Alan Kurdi, the

refugee child who washed up on a Turkish beach in 2016.

Notes

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1976. Sade, Fourier, Loyola . Trans lated by Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press .

———. 1977. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes . Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang .

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03518-2

———. 1990. S/Z. Translated by Richard Mille r. Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 1993. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Trans lated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage.

———. 2005. The Neutral : Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 . Transl ated by Rosalind Kraus and

Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2011. The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Course and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and

1979– 1980) . Edited by Natalie Léger. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Batchen, Geoffrey, ed. 2009. Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press.

Bleeker, Maaike. 2008. Visuality in the Theatre: The locus of looking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan .

https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583368

Bottoms, Stephen. 1988. "The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality." Theatre Journal 50 (4):

421–446. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.1998.0100

Bottoms, Stephen and Matthew Goulish, eds. 2007. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island.

London: Routledge.

Briggs, Kate. 2015. "Practising with Roland Barthes." L'Esprit Créateur. 55 (4): 118– 130.

https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2015.0053

Cull, Laura. 2012. "Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the Problem of 'Application'." Theatre Research

International 37 (1): 20 –27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883311000733

Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. 2007. "The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11." Art Journal 66

(4): 84–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2007.10791285

Fried, Michael. 2008. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Per formance and the Politics of Movement . London: Routledge.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. 1997. Writing the Image After Roland Barthes. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.

Scheie, Timothy. 2006. Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre . Toronto: University of Toronto Press .

https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442678354

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . London: Routledge .

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017)

Biography

Harry Robert Wilson is a performance maker and researcher based in Glasgow. He has an MA and an MPhil in

Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow. Harry has shown performance work at Battersea Arts Centre

(London), the Arches, Buzzcut Festival (Glasgow) Summerhall (Edinburgh), DCA and GENERATORProjects (Dundee)

and DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery (Chicago). Harry has taught on the Theatre Studies course at the

University of Glasgow and on the Contemporary Performance Practice course at the Royal Conservatoire of

Scotland. He is currently undertaking an AHRC funded, practice-as-research PhD project at the University of

Glasgow exploring the relationships between performance and photography.

© 2017 Harry Robert Wilson

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

  • Harry Wilson Harry Wilson

Roland Barthes's influential book on photography Camera Lucida has been discussed by Michael Fried as an exercise in 'antitheatrical critical thought', for its celebration of the accidental, non-intentional, detail and the naïve non-performance of the photographed subject (see Fried 2008 Fried, Michael (2008) Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]). However, in Barthes's comparison between photography and theatre in the book he evokes Samuel Weber's definition of theatricality as an interruption of the Aristotelean movement toward a 'meaningful goal' (Weber 2004 Weber, Samuel (2004) Theatricality as Medium, New York, NY: Fordham University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 46). Barthes explores the photograph's 'foreclosure of the Tragic' that 'excludes all purification, all catharsis', writing that nothing in the photograph 'can transform my grief into mourning' (Barthes 1993 Barthes, Roland (1993) Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage. [Google Scholar]: 90). In these remarks Barthes sets up a distinction between the self-affirming cultural practice of mourning and the more painful, ongoing affective realm of grief. In 2017 I staged After Camera Lucida, a practice-as-research performance at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow that responded to the concepts, methods and form of Barthes's book through my own personal experience of losing my mother when I was 14. This article critically reflects on After Camera Lucida, contextualising the performance through Barthes's ideas, Weber's concept of theatricality and recent scholarly work between theatre studies, visual studies and film. The article explores the ways that After Camera Lucida practised the suspension of mourning and catharsis as a particularly theatrical a/effect and how the slowing down of movement and time in the work explored a radical theatricality circulating between bodies, spaces and images. The article is punctuated by photographic documentation of the performance from Glasgow-based artist Julia-Kristina Bauer.

  • Timothy Scheie

Throughout his career, famed critical theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had a complex and often uneasy relationship with theatre and performance. From his early theatre criticism, through his abrupt and enigmatic silence on theatre, to the theoretical 'stagings' of his thought in the 1970s, Barthes committed several stunning reversals with his opinions on theatrical performance. In Performance Degree Zero, Timothy Scheie argues that Barthes's body of work must be considered a lifelong engagement with theatre. Exploring his changing critical methodologies, Scheie provides a new understanding of the rapid shifts in critical modes Barthes traverses, from a Sartrean Marxism in the 1950s, through semiology, to French Post-Structuralism and the mournful introspection of his later years. The theatrical figure illuminates Barthes's accounts of the sign, the text, the body, homosexuality, love, the voice, photography, and other important and contested terms of his thought. Performance Degree Zerooffers the first comprehensive account of Barthes's lifelong engagement with theatre and performance and fills a significant gap in Barthes criticism. It is essential reading for all Barthes scholars, theatre historians, and performance theorists.

  • A. Lepecki

The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US. Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies. In this far-ranging and exceptional study, Andre Lepecki brilliantly analyzes the work of the choreographers: Jerome Bel (France), Juan Dominguez (Spain), Trisha Brown (US), La Ribot (Spain), Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany), Vera Mantero (Portugal) and visual and performance artists: Bruce Nauman (US), William Pope.L (US). This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.

  • Kate Briggs Kate Briggs

This article considers a distinction that Barthes makes (in his last lecture course) between two kinds of readers: those for whom the pleasure of reading is satisfied by the reading experience, and those for whom the pleasure of reading extant writing is made restless by the desire to add oneself actively to the work one loves. It then describes some of the forms that this active adding or appending might take: for Barthes, playing a Bach movement himself, on his own piano, but too slowly, or drawing from a Cy Twombly monograph; for the author, teaching from the writing instructions she hears in The Preparation of the Novel, giving concrete form to Barthes's notion of a pathetic literary criticism, and translation.

  • Rebecca Schneider Rebecca Schneider

'At last, the past has arrived! Performing Remains is Rebecca Schneider's authoritative statement on a major topic of interest to the field of theatre and performance studies. It extends and consolidates her pioneering contributions to the field through its interdisciplinary method, vivid writing, and stimulating polemic. Performing Remains has been eagerly awaited, and will be appreciated now and in the future for its rigorous investigations into the aesthetic and political potential of reenactments.' - Tavia Nyong'o, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

  • Andrea D. Fitzpatrick

Are those who fell to their deaths on September 11, 2001, exploited or honored by the display of images representing their experiences? While the circumstances that led to the actions of the man in Richard Drew's photograph are unprecedented, images of falling are not new to photojournalism or contemporary art. That images of those who fell from the towers became traumatically imprinted in people's minds suggests that they urgently merit not only detailed study but also deeper contextualization within visual culture.

  • Laura Cull

This article begins from the premise that a 'critical turning point' has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance 'examples'. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.

  • Stephen Bottoms Stephen Bottoms

Theatre Journal 50.4 (1998) 421-446 These two sequences appear, at first glance, to belong to entirely different categories of contemporary American performance work. The first, an insistently repetitive examination of a fairly simple set of movements, minimalist and self-reflexive, suggests the tradition of "analytic postmodern dance," as pioneered by members of the Judson Dance Theatre in the early 1960s. The second, in its self-consciously mediated reconstruction of a textual fragment lifted from the detritus of American popular culture, immediately suggests links with experimental theatre work of the type pioneered by the Wooster Group in the 1980s. In fact, both these sequences appear in the same performance, How Dear to Me the Hour when Daylight Dies, premiered in 1996 by the Chicago-based performance group, Goat Island. Daylight Dies presents a bewilderingly diverse array of performance activities, held together by what Henry Sayre has called "Single work" it may be, but Daylight Dies is certainly not (and nor does it pretend to be) a unified work. In what follows, I want to provide a detailed analysis of this performance, and in so doing to propose a theoretical perspective from which Goat Island's work can be viewed, and locate that work in relation to some key performance trends of recent decades. I will suggest, in particular, that the writings of Deleuze and Guattari -- especially their ideas of rhizome and multiplicity as presented in A Thousand Plateaus--offers a lens through which the group's practices can begin to be appreciated critically. My contention is that Goat Island's distinctively extreme brand of recombinant performance represents a significant development in contemporary art practice, both aesthetically and politically. Before exploring the two sequences...

and was subsequently performed at Outskirts Festival at Platform in Easterhouse

  • Kairos Was
  • Glasgow

Kairos was originally made for Buzzcut Festival in Glasgow in April 2016 and was subsequently performed at Outskirts Festival at Platform in Easterhouse (April 2016) and at Live Art Bistro in Leeds (June 2016).