‘So Much Wasted’: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Perverse Modernities) - Softcover

Anderson, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822348284 ISBN 13: 9780822348283

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson analyzes self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison. Homing in on those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts in which they do so, he examines the diagnostic history of anorexia nervosa, fasts staged by artists including Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, and a hunger strike initiated by Turkish prisoners. Anderson explores what it means for the clinic, the gallery, and the prison when one performs a refusal to consume as a strategy of negation or resistance, and the ways that self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed, however unconsciously, toward death, produces violence, suffering, disappearance, and loss differently from other practices. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Peggy Phelan, and others, he considers how the subject of self-starvation is refigured in relation to larger institutional and ideological drives, including those of the state. The ontological significance of performance as disappearance constitutes what Anderson calls the “politics of morbidity,” the embodied, interventional embrace of mortality and disappearance not as destructive, but rather as radically productive stagings of subject formations in which subjectivity and objecthood, presence and absence, and life and death are intertwined.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Anderson is Associate Professor of Communication and a faculty affiliate of Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a co-editor of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict.

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"Patrick Anderson has written a wonderful book, one that will have a real impact on the field of performance studies. The topic that he has chosen is important and timely: the forced feeding of prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantanamo, the anorexia epidemic among young women (and now men), and the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube are only some of the most recent and urgent questions that have surfaced around the practice and politics of starvation and who, ultimately, has the power over the individual body."--Diana Taylor, author of "The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas"

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SO MUCH WASTED

Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of ResistanceBy PATRICK ANDERSON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4828-3

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................ixINTRODUCTION Hunger in the Event of Subjectivity.....................1ONE The Archive of Anorexia...........................................30TWO Enduring Performance..............................................57THREE How to Stage Self-Consumption...................................85FOUR To Lie Down to Death for Days....................................110AFTERWORD The Ends of Hunger..........................................138Notes.................................................................153References............................................................173Index.................................................................185

Chapter One

the archive of anorexia

* * *

The subject of "dying" gave him much preoccupation at this time. ... He said to me that when he died he would move only very slowly-like this.... He also asked if one did not eat for a very long time would one have to die then, and how long would it take before one died from it. -Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation By the blindness of the way he has chosen, against himself, in spite of himself, with its veerings, detours, and circlings back, his step, always one step in front of nowhere, invents the road he has taken. -Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger

In the opening scene we do not know where we are. The full and shapely lips of an anonymous mouth appear in extreme close-up-like Rocky Horror, like the Rolling Stones, like the gasping lead character in Samuel Beckett's Not I-calmly reading a list of procedures: "breast reduction, abdominoplasty, liposuction, body contouring, collagen injection." In a flash the frame slips forty-five degrees, the mouth now set at an angle, continuing to speak, as if reading from a relentlessly hopeful medical brochure: "Often changing how one looks on the outside changes one's perception of the world, giving one an inner sense of well-being and self-confidence." Another flash, the mouth now panning across the screen like a landscape shot: "You will re-enter the world, not only looking great, but feeling great." This is Tom's Flesh.

We may have noticed the teeth, wet and unevenly arranged behind the moving lips. We may have noticed the voice's deep tonal resonances-it "sounds like a man"-and wondered how or if it maps onto the body we have yet to see. We may have noticed that once the lips open to speak, they do not again close. But just as abruptly as it appeared, the mouth is gone, replaced by a wandering gaze that sweeps cautiously, tenderly across the spinning lights of a fairground, accompanied by the casual tinkling of a music box. These grainy views will toggle throughout the short film to the slow-motion nostalgia of an old Super 8: children in various states of apparent domestic bliss. But in a viciously gentle game of fort and da, what the screen gives it will also take away. These idyllic scenes are accompanied by ominous lines from our narrator: "I deserved what he did to me"; "He made me stand in front of them, welted and bleeding"; and from a new, second voice, whispered with a foreboding annunciative accuracy, "See how lucky you are not to be me." In time-we might, after Cathy Caruth, say in the time of trauma-these images are replaced by others, at first more difficult to read: segments of skin stretched and twisted into unrecognizable forms; postoperative scars of survival; bodily landscapes that constitute what the voice calls "beauty." As the first narrator tells us, "I've undone everything. I've undone it all."

The ontology of that undoing, described simply on the film's first series of intertitles, begins with a complicated scene of recognition: "Age 7: My father told me that I was fat / I looked in the mirror / He was right." In a dramatic retelling of Lacan's story of the mirror stage-or from another angle, a reimagining of Althusser's street scene-the voice of Tom's father occasions a search for the subject, a visual turn to answer the father's call. Tom looks to the mirror to see himself, and in so seeing he becomes what his father summons. The momentum of that becoming -in Nietzsche's words, that movement "across the turbulent stream of becoming"-accelerates as more scenes from Tom's childhood echo with the father's cruel calls: "Boys don't love"; "He slapped me when I said the word love." Moments later we see "Age 11: I weighed 180 lbs." And then, with a soft but resounding climax of commencement, Tom's story turns: "Age 18: I weighed 300 lbs. / I stopped eating / In seven months I lost over 180 lbs. / I became anorexic."

If the emergence of anorexia in Tom's narrative marks the commencement of a certain kind of becoming, a becoming that is itself an undoing, it alone among his strategies of survival remains otherwise unspoken throughout the film. Anorexia is marked within the script of that single intertitle, but it is never again spoken, never demonstrated as openly and graphically as the many other practices-self-laceration, a grotesque kind of play with the wounds from his father's abuse, reconstructive and cosmetic surgeries-that constitute Tom's becoming. These are excessively represented, indeed almost overrepresented, in the images and spoken narratives of the film. But anorexia, so insistent, so haunting in that initial citation, will not likewise be archived within the scopic or narrative space of Tom's Flesh; anorexia appears both to index and to archive itself. Or rather-"Age 11: I weighed 180 lbs."; "Age 18: ... I lost over 180 lbs."-anorexia becomes the force and the law of Tom's corporeally archival work.

Tom's Flesh reveals anorexia, perhaps especially in the silent persistence of its presence in the film, as itself an archival project of undoing and becoming, a deeply (to use Paul Connerton's word) incorporated historiography of trauma. At the same time, anorexia exceeds its conventional role as a nomenclature of individual suffering, especially since its introduction into a broader cultural presence in the closing decades of the twentieth century. We might locate that colloquial inauguration of anorexia on a Las Vegas nightclub stage in the fall of 1975, when the popular musician Karen Carpenter collapsed while singing "Top of the World"; or on the morning of 5 February 1983, when news of Carpenter's death from a "starvation diet" was published in newspapers across the United States. As the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes of these events, Carpenter's experiences "fueled interest in the disease [and] focused national attention on the life-and-death drama of anorexia nervosa." Where previously in its troubled history the concept of anorexia, perhaps the very word anorexia functioned as a technical taxonomy of disease in rarified spaces (clinics, hospitals, medical theaters), suddenly in the 1970s and 1980s it also became a vernacular, an everyday word, an idiom.

These rhetorical transformations likewise disclose the agility of anorexia as a speech act. That is, as a practice, as a constellation of practices that reveals both the grave performativity of clinical diagnosis and the diagnostic power of cultural representation, anorexia transgresses the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822348284
• ISBN 13: 9780822348283
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 204
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland