Post-Backlash Feminism

from "Scenes from a Marriage: Lyotard, Pinter and the Theater of Gender"
(in Gender after Lyotard, ed. Margret Grebowicz, SUNY, 2007)

 

 

“There is no sign or thought of the sign which is not about power and for power”

(Libidinal Economy)

 

“Theater places us right at the heart of what is religious-political:

in the heart of absence, in negativity, in nihilism as Nietzsche would say,

therefore in the question of power.”

                                                (“The Tooth, The Palm”)

 

Whereas Foucault’s analysis of the tormented body promises untrammeled—therefore potentially non-ideological—signification, Lyotard's critique of language exposes the coercive certainties of performance. The body in Lyotard is as much an idea conjured through the performative, as it is the site of literal coercive affect. Indeed, when Lyotard argues that power “consists of the capacity to make the signified appear referentially,” that is, “in reality,” he elides the distinction between the abstract/metaphorical performative and the concrete/material body.[i] The “body,” then, manifests within discourse as the idea of power and within everyday life as the material embodiment of that idea. Similarly, theatrical performance consists of an untenable paradox. Inherent in the artifice of theatrical production is a lack of the thing itself; characters do not exist in any irreducible form within the body of the actor, but accrue performatively through a series of conventionally signifying gestures. This is not unlike the contemporary conception of gender as a culturally coded performance; for example, one becomes “woman” through, “a stylized repetition of acts.”[ii] Embedded within the stylized, conventional performance resides a code to which readers, or audience members, enjoy access and without which reading gender would be impossible.

In “Futility and Revolution” Lyotard ties signification to power within both discourse and the theater, reminding us of the impossibility of signification outside an ideological hierarchy (“what is religious-political”) and underscoring the violence inherent in any culturally sanctioned gender formation. Lyotard’s discussion of the Jacobin Terror centers specifically on the historical/ideological implications of female resistance (the “sansculottes”) to the Robespierrists, and, more generally (and theoretically) upon the relationship between female identity formation and the Republic’s notion of itself as “a single performing body.”[iii]Versailles characterized as “the great stage […] where, for over a century, the glittering spectacle of despotism was played out,” and moments of public resistance described as “playing scenes.” Lyotard specifically links politics, identity formation, and the theater when he observes of the function of the theater in eighteenth-century France: “the theatrical institution […] manifests the instinctual processes that operate centrally within the representational function.”[iv] In other words, he continues: One does not go to the theater for a change of scenery: the scene in the streets (a ‘political’ scene) extends into the auditorium and occasionally onto the stage itself.[v] References to the stage or theater appear in this piece as floating metaphors and function as modes of imagining the political realities of that time. Further, Lyotard simultaneously theorizes these realities—that is to say, he renders them into a set of philosophical assumptions useful for the analysis of other performative moments. For example, in this work, the Terror itself is positioned as a demonstration of “performative authority,”

Selecting eclectically from Lyotard’s oeuvre and considering his interrogation of language and performativity, I will discuss Eucharistic performativity—my own paraphrase of Lyotard’s notions of dematerialization, the theater, and Eucharistic transfiguration—as an essential element of female identity formation within patriarchy. Further, I intend to adopt this notion of transfiguration as a metaphor for the performance (and/or achievement) of female identity on the Western stage and to argue that while signification is tied to power generally, signifying “woman” is tied to violence specifically.