Laura Hinton
“Doing Things with Fetishism”: The Performing Hybrids in Carla Harryman’s Poetry Play Performing Objects Stationed in the Subworld
Hybrid writings [are] staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic and history, abstractions and androgyny, the rational and the nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves against normative ideas while using whatever tools ...or poetic discourses [that] present themselves to advance their tellings.
Fetishism [is] ... a potential source for productive answers to questions about how subjects negotiate difference....
Carla Harryman’s Performing Objects Stationed in the Subworld is a work of poet’s theater that “negotiates difference” by putting into play (into the “play”) what D.W. Winnicott calls “transitional objects.”3 These “transitional objects” are the fetish-like objects of infant and adult fascination and fantasy. Harryman’s performance work cobbles together — out of people, things, words and texts, visual as well as oral -- these “transitional objects” that create an “intermediate area of experience” Winnicott describes in observing the activity of young children in play. Like Winnicott, and like Harryman in Performing Objects, I will treat that “intermediate area” of play as the realm of art, particularly in non-narrative multi-media performance art.
Performing Subjects and Fetish Objects
While the classic psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud describes art as an activity that “sublimates” the sex instinct, Winnicott’s object-relations theory offers a radically different theory about the nature of artistic achievement -- a theory I believe Harryman inscribes in her subtext to Performing Objects. Winnicott describes art as using “transitional objects” of desire much like children use dolls, the self-sounds of baby babble, and even other children themselves. Like their transitional objects, the subjects at play and in art maintain only temporal “identities” in the “intermediate area of experience.” The very the concept of the so-called “psychoanalytic” becomes an entity that is performance-based, and situates “subjectivity” within an immediate and transitory condition of performance presentation. As “subjects” adapt to shifting and make-believe identities, literally making themselves up in play, they mirror the instability of their objects. These objects serve as fantasy fetishes. While notoriously striving for their monumentalizing and eternalizing effects, these object-fetishes are inherently instable, as E.L. McCallum’s Object Lessons explains. The object-fetish is ironic, attempting to sublimate the fear of loss linked to castration, and doing so through a representational process of “substitution,” which Freud first theorized in his 1928 essay, “Fetishism.4 The “subject” in its mirror encounter with the fetish-objects of play becomes less about identity than about adaptation, re-adaptation, mutation, accretion, “substitution,” supplementary action. It engages with fetish objects in a playful activity, one that is continuously gathering, spinning, tossing out before other mirroring subjects alternative subjectivities and their positionings — all of which might reflect multiple and play-ful points of view.
Harryman’s Performing Objects puts the instability of the subject at play on stage. And it puts into play the ironic instability of subjectivity’s fetish objects — puts them to good “use,” borrowing that word from McCallum. In a book with the subtitle, “How to Do Things with Fetishism,” McCallum states that she wishes to “de-fetishize fetishism,” that is, to “unloosen its fixed meaning, examine its internal contradictions, and release the fetish from its overdetermined and overdetermining interpretation as the very pinnacle of the Thing, an object the fetishist is stuck on as the embodiment of substance and meaning” (McCallum). But one must separate the concept of fetishism from its Freudian-schooled moorings — “the dominance of that penis-substitution definition” (McCallum 4) — in order return again to its interrogation effects. In Harryman’s “use” of fetish-objects that mimic the hybrid personas before us in her poet’s theater play — all of whom are engaged in continual acts of imagination and play — Harryman, too, uses fetishism as a means of interrogation. She demonstrates through her own act of “play” that object fetishism can be a source of subjectivity’s “self” substitutions. These “perform” ironic, internal contradictions, or “splittings” of “self” (mirrored in the object).
These issues of subject-object mirroring and play in Performing Objects occur in Harryman’s work both as scripted (written) text, and in performance. I was actually at the opening night of the San Francisco staged performance of the poet’s theater play in Fall 2003; and here I refer to a DVD video reproduction of the performance made that same night. What is important to note about Performing Objects as a work of poet’s theater is that I — and all of us — were and are immersed in its dense, spectacular poetic language as spectators as well as poetry auditors. We do have an special aural relationship to poetry in performance, as the writers in Charles Bernstein’s excellent volume, Close Listening, have theorized.5 Yet little critical attention has been given to the role of the visual in performance poetics — and by discussing object-fetishism, I wish to do that here. This attention to the visual — to space and the spectacle, from a subject’s position as audience viewer — is particularly important to discussing a work of poet’s theater phenomenally staged as Performing Objects in its San Francisco incarnation, in the Mission District, at a performance space called The Lab. We are called upon not only to “listen,” but to watch. And our eyes are drawn not only to the literal Things — the performing objects — that litter the stage, but also to their embodied representation in the human “subjects” that, through play, are using them.
These objects, like their subjects, form part of the hybrid multi-media that Harryman involves herself in as a poet, when she incorporated a visual installation as her theatrical mis-en-scene. As “the play” unfolds, these dead-looking objects of a Detroit junkyard appear to enter symbolic use, and gain transformatory currency. “Things” on the stage, which may or may not apparently “belong” (to any-one, or seemingly within the context of the play itself) are like their human mirror-performers, hybridic, performance playthings — both source of art, and the “art” that is always changing through various hybrid incarnations. As objects, they also form embodied “presences,” in the human stage players who play with them, and who come to stand as extensions of, as well as “substitutes” for, objects through play. They perform themselves as “transitional objects.” They become hybrids both of themselves and of their human “others.”
Substitutes of substitutes, Things are their own human “others.” And they made the human subject in this poetry play “other” to itself. There are no closed-off, distinct ego-bound personalities; rather, every embodied human figure is a hybrid constantly in performance, continually changing. Hybridity in the figure of the play extends to the nature of the performance text, as well, both staged and as read on the page. When we read the performance text, for example, we find it to be an object composed of many competing, hybrid-object “art” and “playing” parts, through the multiple discourses -- both visual and oral -- that “make the text up,” as imaginary act.
These hybrid parts of the performance work are part of the “internal splitting” process, or on-going “splitting/s,” that compose the performance text. This is a hybrid text that is voiceless and faceless, only because it offers so many visual-verbal points of view, so many “faces” of potential character, representational objects, and objects of thought, as well. The hybrid parts are like “portions” of the imaginary “intermediate” realm that fascinate, just like the fetish does, in its various cultural guises -- the commodity fetish, the sexual fetish, the woman as fetish, and combinations of the above. If the classic fetish described by Freud attempts to make a whole appear out of its substitutional parts (in order to maintain, of course, the subject’s nostalgically regressive, monumentalizing desires in reaction to castration), Harryman’s Performing Objects is a work of poet’s theater at work, one which keeps its objects from consolidating, forever at play. The subjects like their objects refuse traditional fetishism’s form of self-censure; and they refuse to monumentalize or close off the object in the traditional fetish process of containment (of fear, of unscripted desire). Instead, Performing Objects celebrates the difference of play, within “play” and the “intermediate” zone of the performance text. It employs fetishism’s ironies to make the “intermediate area” more visceral, if sometimes threateningly so, more alive.
As McCallum notes, the fetish gets its sensational charge, its thrill or “fascination,” by this “sexy,” performative co-mingling with its subject — a subject once again bound up with the object’s playful, representational ambiguity. Such ambiguity can be “useful,” as McCallum writes, when the fetish directs us “into the basic hermeneutic problem of how one can grasp, of even approach, the radically different, and communicate it to those like oneself without compromising the difference of the other” (McCallum 3). Another commentator on fetishism in its artistic-representational role, the film critic Christian Metz, admits that fetishism’s ambiguity always re-generates the problem of “perception.” That problem is located in the act of seeing the fetish, which wants to appear before its subject as one “Thing,” but inevitably returns to reappear as another. This circuitous process is described in Metz’s analysis of fetishism’s “disavowal” (the Freudian “Verleungnung” ) of seeing the mother’s “missing” phallus. This is the “sight” (as non-site) that inaugurates fetishism to begin with. Disavowal arises when female sexual difference registers as anatomical “lack,” and which then “necessarily” must be re-covered / covered up through hybridic substitute mechanisms. Metz explains, however, that this mechanism always generates internal difference within the subject. The subject perceives maternal “lack,” then, in turn, creates the fetish to deny it. As representation is born, so to is the subject’s on-going “internal splittings.”
Winnicott’s realm of “the intermediate area” of play might well be considered to be a site where subjects can stage their own objects — as re-presentations of the “internal splitting/s.” I credit Nick Piombino in his use of Winnicott to describe performance effects in contemporary poetry as this site of play, particularly as he shows Winnicott’s “’transitional object’” to be, in poetics, a source of “sounds, both audible and imaged.”6 Piombino’s emphasis is on the “aural ellipsis” that is created “between a poet and listeners at a reading,” or “an intensified collaborative sharing” that is play, is linked to these “transitional phenomena’” (to use another Winnicott phrase), which the object-relations theorist refers to as a
“designation of the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral eroticism and the true object-relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected . . . By this definition an infant’s babbling and the way in which an older child goes over a repertory of songs and tunes while preparing for sleep come within the intermediate area . . . along with the use made of objects that are not part of the infant’s body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality.”7
As we come to embrace the essentially visual as well as “aural” capacity of objects in a performance poem, we might note what Piombino himself, quoting Winnicott again, calls those objects’ “’potential space between the individual and the environment’” (Piombino quotes Winnicott, 58; emphasis original). And we might note — and see -- the spatialized referents that the fetish-object constructs when staged. Before our own playful look — not a steely gaze, but an engaged look of concentration — we, the audience spectators of a poetry play, mirror the subjects who mirror objects. We, too, become part of the “intermediate” zone of play in our experience of “the play.” A general ambiance of ontological instability reigns — and through this, our own spectatorial subjectivity is called into question, pleasured, entertained.
“Internal Splitting/s” and Hybrid Figuration
In the poetry play, the “internal splitting/s” prefigure the hybrid “parts” that compose the work of performance art on all kinds of levels. First, the mis-en-scene constitutes one level of the “internal splitting” off, or hybrid figuration, that puts into play the “intermediate area” — from the moment the “play” opens before our eyes. The San Francisco performance text I witnessed was/is (as performance digital archive) particularly rich for a mis-en-scene composed of hybridic parts. The set design which doubled (“internally split”) as a visual-art gallery installation was created for Harryman’s piece by artist Amy Trachtenberg. The very collective process by which the San Francisco theatre version was created, in its multiple interactions between director, author, actors, musicians and visual artist, mirrors the textual hybrids that compose as text. Multiple voices, visions, personalities, subjects and art objects are put into play in a production that is part art installation and visual text, part operetta (with music by Erling Wold), part Language poetry, part psychological drama, part slapstick comedy, part silly child’s play. Even the environmental setting suggested by the staging of Performing Objects is a hybridic representation. As the website for Performing Objects notes, the work as a whole “portrays a world ... always under construction. . . Situated between the sliding borders of city and suburb and between commonplace existence and fantasy.” Certainly the multiple collaborations that organize the hybridic text underscore the fetish-object slippages as it makes its substitutions through the multi-media platform of the piece, and the multiple concepts of art these slippages between form suggest.
Among the hodge-podge of object “Things” that lay upon the stage are piles of tires, a ladder, stacks of old newspapers, pipes and buckets and bins of metal parts. Associated with urban refuse, these objects that once might have had fetish interest in the world of mechanical “reality” but have long since lost their “use,” are put to new use, a recycled use, by a performing human figure known as C2, or the Child. C2 enters the “intermediate area” of the performance arena, to give these old objects new currency through her activity of “play.” These disconnected once-socialized mechanical “parts” are reinvigorated by C2, the Child, and granted new fetish meaning through readapted, substituted identities -- made possible through her improvisational roles. It is her play as “child’s play” which inaugurates the “play” of poet’s theater art — through the re-play of the interpretation of fetish objects. Albeit voiceless at first, the Child/C2 makes herself heard through the metallic objects she clashes together; she makes startling loud sounds. Picking up an object that looks like a pastry wheel, for instance, she (infant-like) rolls it around while on her hands and knees. What was once an indefinable wheel perhaps used in a cook’s kitchen has now become a mobile toy car that gives joy and desire to the Child.