Category Archives: performance

No Spectators

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Over the last few days, the idea of the “wild” has, as it were, “accidentally” cropped up repeatedly, from questions of climate change, to Beasts of the Southern Wild and gaga feminism. That’s one of the intriguing things about a durational project of this kind, how ideas arise unexpectedly that you would not otherwise have spent much time on. So what would happen if we bring the three figures of wilding, walking and occupying together? You would not be spectating, that’s for sure.

Occupying is not in itself walking but it is moving in both senses. It creates (a) movement and it is emotionally stirring. The Zapatista koan of “walking while asking questions” has seemed a good way to describe it. If “walk on the wild side” evokes the subcultures of the 1970s, Occupy is not quite that. Subcultures had codes that were recognizable to themselves but mysterious or off-putting to others, from Oscar Wilde’s queer green carnation to punk safety-pins. They invited people to look but not to understand the internal dynamics of the subculture.

Both during the encampments and the “movement of movements,” Occupy has sought to change people. Or more exactly, people have made the Occupy movement into a vehicle for change. For many of us, this is the most important aspect of the project, like feminist, queer and other variants on “the personal is political.” In this case, the dynamic was intended to change those already there and draw others in.

Writing in the fifth edition of Occupy!, filmmaker Astra Taylor describes how this has worked for her as a stepping off the sidelines that

has stripped me of the self-righteousness and surety that comes with being a spectator.

As a filmmaker who has worked with Zizek we can safely assume that Taylor is not unaware of gaze theory. Yet she puts herself into the place of being looked at as part of her decision to be involved in the process, realizing that

people are complicated, that the way to achieve profound political change is not clear, but that we must move forward nonetheless, adapting our thinking and our strategy along the way.

This may not sound “wild” but that’s what it is– a refusal to define a “line” that we must follow, to make the now infamous demands, or to assume that clarity is the greatest of virtues.

By resisting the politics of representation, we have found, almost by accident, a performative practice that is unplanned, unscripted and seen only by the other “performers.” It couldn’t be further from the currently hegemonic vogue for Marina Abramovic-style staged performance, putting the self-styled artist fully in control. To occupy, to be wild, or to walk with questions is instead to perform the right to look, in which I invent you and vice versa, a fully mutual engagement.

So far, so hooray for us. Doing “not spectating” has worked for a year. We’ve countervisualized to good effect. What we have not yet done is get fully beyond the militarized tropes of visuality. We march. We lay siege to Wall Street. We do this in the name of direct action as opposed to symbolic action.

But it’s all symbolic. After all, very few of the one per cent actually work on Wall Street itself: they’re in mid-town or Connecticut but everyone gets why shutting down Wall Street is symbolically powerful. Better yet are symbols that do not rely on a rhetoric of power and force and do not mimic military tactics. They exist: the Occupy Town Square events, the Free University, guided walks around Wall Street to tell people hidden histories of the financial district, and many more. Within and without the movement, though, there is a sense that these are not “real” actions and that confrontation equals realness. As Lady Gaga can tell you, realness is way overrated.

 

 

 

The Chair

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Today I went past a noisy and aggressive Tea Party roadside rally in Setauket, New York. The people were all white, all over 50 and all angry. In other words, they were the Clint Eastwood audience. As apparently crazy as that performance was, it articulated very clearly the vivid resentment middle-aged white people feel and direct towards the empty space they call “Obama.”

I refused to watch a moment of the Republican convention, just as I will ignore the Democrats. There was something about the stills of Eastwood’s performance that made me watch the video. Although it has suggested avant-garde performance art to some people, it was clearly designed to appeal to those with long memories. As a number of reporters have suggested, the whole chair routine was a steal from the circa-1950 comedy of Bob Newhart and Morey Amsterdam. There’s also a certain inherent period nastiness to “the chair,” evoking as it does the electric chair so favored as a method of execution in the Cold War era.

For this evocation of time and place was specifically designed to reinforce the aura of white privilege that surrounds Romney but to give it a more violent edge. Eastwood’s Gran Torino performance was remembered by the Republican audience for its initial racism not the feel-good “liberal” conclusion. Not once but twice, Eastwood ventriloquized Obama as saying “go fuck yourself” to roars of approval–clearly Obama’s refusal to play “angry person of color” nonetheless angers this kind of white person.

The moment in the video that resonated with the apparently all-white crowd was when Eastwood said

You own this country.

It’s a standard bit of political boiler-plate from a professional but from an actor associated with vigilantes and outlaw cops, it had a different affect. They heard it as saying “this is still a country for white Christians with guns as it has been since the arrival of Europeans.” So when the crowd chanted with Eastwood at the end

Go ahead, make my day

it was an enactment of an NRA fantasy moment.

The Democratic media have seen the affair as a joke. For Jon Stewart, this was the greatest gift since Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. But Stewart was not just being funny when he said

There’s a President Obama only Republicans can see

Obama serves as a screen for white people to register what they think about “race,” meaning the visible presence of any non-white person in public life. For 50s-nostalgic Republicans and reactionaries of all kinds, the proper place of the person of color is as what Ralph Ellison famously called “the invisible man.” This “Obama” knows his place, and can be put down at will if he gets “uppity.” Into his (baby) chair.

I am not particularly invested in the re-election of Obama, other than as being preferable to the alternative. The “Obama” that Eastwood and his acolytes see, however, is genuinely disturbing. It’s why Bloomberg gets away with stop-and-frisk. It’s why the economic crisis has wiped out a generation of wealth accumulation by African Americans and left them not only disadvantaged but being blamed for the crisis. It’s why police can use violence at will against Occupy and have no fear of reprisal. Oddly, we should perhaps thank Eastwood for making all this visible to us once again.

Society of Debt II: Shame and Abolition

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[Part two of the text for ‘Yours In Debt! Part One is here]

{The Expert returns onstage, a mess of water and erased chalk. The Assistants are slumped on the ground}

It seems that debt is a bit of a mess. Maybe a word cloud or analysis isn’t the right way to go after all. There are two reasons why that might be so.

First, we need debt. Not as money but as social obligation. It’s what connects us as people. Say I make you a birthday cake. You don’t come round to my house the next day with another cake because that would be weird. Still less do you give me money because that would be rude. So out there is the idea that maybe one day you’ll make me a cake. And that’s nice. Which is one of the ways we stay connected rather than as entirely separate individuals.

Then there’s shame. Debt makes us ashamed, it’s embarrassing. Shame itself is a very complex emotion, like debt. It’s physical. We blush, sweat, find it hard to talk, you might even cry. At the same time it’s external. People say:

“Why did you take out all that debt if you can’t pay it back?”

“What were you thinking?”

“Aren’t you ashamed?”

If actual people don’t say this, we imagine that they do and it is demeaning. It’s odd, though, this association of debt with shame. A debt is a technical contract that says we will lend you X units, which you will return plus Y interest. Of all social exchanges, why does morality apply to this one?

One of the odder things about modernity is the way that it has secularized religious strategies for population care, control and management. So whereas the faithful once went to confession, we in New York now go to therapy and for $150 for a 50-minute hour, we receive absolution. In the Middle Ages, the Church took debt very seriously. Officially, they were opposed to any charging of interest. At the same time, it told its members that certain sins were so serious that they would incur a “debt of punishment,” meaning hellfire for eternity. There was one way out of this. You could, if you were rich, buy something called an indulgence, which allowed you to evade the debt of punishment.

Now that starts to sound a bit familiar doesn’t it? Indulgences for them, shame for us.

Wait a minute, though. It’s too neat, too clever. It presumes that capitalism is an infernal machine, run by some secret Dr. Evil, machinating and manipulating as it goes. This view appeals to the rich themselves. I think they rather like being called the One Percent, it makes them feel important. In fact, one thing we learned during the financial crisis is that they have no idea what is going on. When the credit default system started to go wrong, all they could do was hit ‘Refresh’ on their computers and the algorithm was supposed to resolve the issues. It kept showing something like “you have lost a ton of money.”

Banks still don’t know what’s going on. Spanish banks couldn’t even calculate how much cash they need for a bailout. Somewhere between 20 and 60 billion euros. Those are not only huge numbers, that’s a huge margin of error. Capitalism comes to seem more like a form of sorcery, a spell that works precisely as long as you believe in it. Or it’s the Emperor’s new clothes, where everything goes fine until one person points out the truth that is in fact in front of our eyes.

This is a dangerous moment for the system, then, one in which the possibility of doing things differently begins to arise. We can start to talk about abolition and reconstruction. One hundred and fifty years ago, another financial system was said to be essential for the economy. Without it there would be no way to produce vital cotton, sugar, coffee and other  goods and ruin would follow. This was slavery. When the enslaved got up at the beginning of the Civil War and left the plantations for the North, they began a remarkable experiment called Reconstruction.

During Reconstruction, another way of being was envisaged. The formerly enslaved abolished debtors prison and penalties for debt, even though those in debt at the time were mostly former slave-owners. They knew that debt was central to the system of slavery and it had to be abolished to fully abolish slavery. Next, they created a system of what we might call mutual aid. There was the first free public school system for all. The first state provision for the disabled. And they made it possible for legislators without personal wealth to serve. Today in Washington, not one person is less than a millionaire. Finally, they did borrow money but in order to buy land for groups of the formerly enslaved, a system we remember as “forty acres and a mule.” This was to have allowed for a collective agriculture on what we would now call a sustainable model.

So how come we never hear about any of this? Because in 1873, following a crash on railroad bonds, Wall Street stopped lending money to the Reconstruction. By 1877, white planters were back in power, segregation was beginning together with the erasure of the thirteen years of Reconstruction from national memory. That’s another source of American shame.

My feeling is that just as slavery was abolished by the actions of the enslaved themselves, so too can the shame of debt can be set aside only by releasing ourselves from the sorcery of capitalism, by refusing to believe in the spell any more. To do that we need to admit our vulnerability and complicity with the system.

So: I am not an expert. My name is Nick. I teach Media Studies at a nasty purple university not far from here. Everything I know about debt, I learned from the Strike Debt Campaign. I am jnvolved with it because of the shame in my profession. At my institution people working on degrees graduate with astonishing amounts of debt. But the numbers in themselves, shocking as they are, don’t matter. What matters is that young people can’t pay this debt and it impedes their lives drastically. Graduation, which should be a moment of hope, becomes the beginning of the repayment of a mortgage. I used to say in academia we do very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for the loan sharks.

From all of this we can learn some old truths in new ways.

The personal is political.

The political is collective.

Another world is possibe.

[Expert exits and returns with a cake. The Assistants share stories about being in debt, share cake with the audience and invite them to continue the discussion. There is no end].

“Debt, debt, debt!”

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These were the opening words of the performance lecture conceived by Ida Daniel and myself in the undergroundzero festival still ongoing in New York. I’m going to describe the performance as a whole today and give a version of the spoken text tomorrow, so as not to go on too long. It’s a bit narcissistic, perhaps, but this is what I’ve been doing in Occupy recently and that’s what this project is about, after all.

Ida, who works as a director in Bulgaria, and I were paired by the festival. She comes from a theatre family. Her grandfather was an influential Brechtian director, as we saw during the performances, when Bulgarian theatre types would approach her reverentially, as might Americans meeting Stanislavsky’s grand-daughter.

Ida attended a Strike Debt assembly in Washington Square Park and became active for the duration of her visit in a working group as well as the assembly. We talked about a format and arrived at a formula whereby the point of the performance would be to undo the idea that we can change the debt situation by means of a more perfect analysis. We wanted to explore the associations of debt with shame and the forms of personal transformation that getting past those connections would entail.

So I went off and wrote some bits and Ida worked with the actors when they could coordinate their schedules. When we started working together it became clear that this was really going to be a performative lecture, not just a lecture with performance around it. Which made me more than a little nervous.

The actors were: Amanda Boekelheide, Darcy Cadman and Tracy Everett, all very gifted and well-trained, all working multiple paying jobs–including preparing apartments to be sprayed for bed bugs–as well as engaging in multiple (often non-paying) acting work. The usual combination of factors meant that they weren’t paid for this performance either, which, for what it’s worth, I did point out to the audience each night (I wasn’t paid of course, but I have a job, so I don’t need to be). The performance was free to the audience as well, though.

The space was a small black-box theatre in the Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural and Education Center on Suffolk Street. There were three lights that operated as on or off so no  fade-in or out was possible, let alone any other theater technology. Somehow, whether because the building is an old school, or because so many performances have taken place there before, it has a very welcoming feel nonetheless. I could imagine a small audience feeling perfectly comfortable there in a way that sometimes you don’t.

The actors opened with a nonsense song that finally converged on a chant of “Debt, Debt, Debt” in the tune of “Frère Jacques.” I emerged from behind a curtain into the space and they carried me in. I was The Expert and they were to be The Assistants. At work here was a combination of Brecht’s theory of the gesture, in which what is not said is as important as what is; with Kafka’s bureaucratic vision in which the not-quite-human Assistants are the only people in whom we can have hope. Ida later told us that she is committed to a theater that thinks, and encourages its audience to think, in body and mind, a very OWS paradigm.

So I introduce the topic of debt, which kept changing as I worked more with the actors, until we got to a point where we engaged in a word association game with the audience. I asked them first to call out how much they were in debt. Then why they were in debt. How it made them feel. And what they wanted to do about it. The Assistants shouted out the answers, wrote them down on the walls of the space and on the floor and gradually created a cacophony of responses. The noise was ended when Amanda picked up Tracy, pushed her against the wall and used her body to erase what was written. She then did the same on the other side with Darcy and he then picked her up to clean off the remaining writing. Meanwhile Tracy used water to clean away any writing on the stage. This was all very funny but we were directed to take it seriously, as our work as The Expert and The Assistants.

In the second half, then, having given up on the idea of a pure analysis, I talked about the curious associations of debt with shame and thought about how we might claim an abolition of debt that we will have to do ourselves. At a certain point in this discussion, the Assistants revived themselves and began a complicated and funny game of exchanging clothing with each other and myself. This game was halted only when I brought out a cake to share–an example I use in the lecture part to show why we will always have debt as a form of social obligation, even if monetary debt disappears.

We distributed the cake to the audience and each performer shared a story about their own experience with debt. We then invited the audience to share stories as well. As I mentioned, Occupy people, who are used to this, took up the offer with alacrity. The second night, when we had performers from other shows in the festival as our main audience, there was surprisingly less willingness to share, even though many people came up to us afterwards and told stories or hinted at them. Debt is so destructive, so hard to discuss.

Debt, debt, debt.

 

Occupy Theatre

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A note to holdover the writing project as a daily endeavor. Today was dominated by three and a half hours on the Long Island Railroad in and out of an insanely hot New York. All worth it though, for the pleasure of working with great actors and engaging with a generous audience who braved the hottest day I can remember to fill the little space for our second and final performance of “Yours In Debt!”

Yesterday we were playing to a largely Occupy-friendly audience, meaning a group of people involved in Occupy and others familiar with its process. So when we called out for audience questions, comments and sharing, they knew exactly what we meant. Tonight was an audience drawn more from theatre, with the exception of my OWS affinity group on Politics and Visual Culture. Collectively, then, this audience wanted more from us in a way but also allowed us to perform a little more, which the real actors in the group appreciated. They were less responsive in the discussion although that was certainly also heat-related.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of a curtain call for a performative lecture on debt, except to thank people for their generosity. I am left with a sense that orchestrating the Occupy project around debt does allow us to reach people in a different way and to reach different people. It most certainly will not be a simple process and it is unlikely to be fast. But on a day when Gayatri Spivak sat out in Washington Square Park and discussed debt with a crowd of Summer Disobedience School students and we worked with a crowd of Eastern European theatre people, perhaps you get that little Occupy shiver, when you do think that another world is possible.

Many years ago I had ambitions to be an actor, only for the realities of trying it to prove very clearly that this was not a path open to me. It’s one of the odder aspects of Occupy’s culture of mutual aid to offer people a second chance like this,  but it’s a memory I will be grateful for. I’ll actually describe what was said and performed later today but for now that’s all folks.

Performing Occupy

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We drove into Manhattan on yet another sizzling day for the “Yours In Debt!” debut and the first thing we saw was a Banksy mural on the Lower East Side, which seemed like a good omen. Then I got a big piece of red felt at a fabric store to make red squares for ten bucks, even better.

The Lower East Side has so changed. A lifetime ago I used to come down to Delancey to get salsa records when I was a DJ. Chi-chi it was not but it had a great vibe and I still have some of those records. Now there’s an organic juice place on every corner–the one opposite where we are working on Suffolk has the most expensive juice I’ve ever seen. It’s good–but $9 for a small container? The old jewish shop signs still survive but under them there are art galleries, hat shops, feminist sex toy stores and all the other paraphrenalia of hipsterdom.

I’ll write something about the content of the piece later but for now I’ll just reflect on this performance of Occupy. Last September and October, the performance was all about process, the mechanics of direct democracy. For those of us who had not had much experience of the global justice movement it was at once fascinating and liberating. OWS was about everything it seemed.

There’s less simple optimism now but more purpose. I was moved to see the front row of the performance filled with Strike Debt comrades, who have all heard me say this stuff before and anyway know just as much about it. When the lights came up I was somewhat embarrassed–and also delighted– to see David Graeber sitting right in the back, as is his wont. My role in the performance is The Expert, who talks about debt. So it was a little bizarre realize that I had done it in front of the real expert in the field.

Sometimes people say Occupy is inward-looking and perhaps there’s some truth to that, as there is in any organization. There’s also real solidarity, as I saw tonight watching people leave in sweat-drenched shirts from the black box space, whose low-rent A/C was not up to the challenge of 95 degrees.

It’ll be interesting to see if events like these and the direction taken over this summer mark a turn to Occupy having a clearer sense of its political targets and self-identity. These will probably be needed if the watch-words “disperse/strike” are to have purpose. Can Occupy consense to consense? So far, I’d say yes.

Phase Two, in rehearsal

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A final day of rehearsals for our debt performance piece “Yours In Debt!” I know people who always practice their talks ahead of time and I’ve done this when I have time. It’s always worth it. Workshopping a set of discussions like this with people skilled in performance has been very interesting. They have been gentle with me and very careful to be subtle about pushing me in a different direction. Over the course of the brief time that we’ve been able to work on the talks, they have notably changed nonetheless.

The simplest way to describe this shift is one away from a fact-laden analysis towards the emotional and spatial experience of being “in” debt and what it would mean to get “out” of debt. In short, in classic Occupy fashion, it’s starting to feel like an exploration of what it would mean to give people permission to view these issues with something other than shame and subjection.

One indication of how far there is to go came from the only question posed by a Bed-Stuy dwelling, bike-riding alternative theatre person, who watched the tech run: “What about people who do pay their debts?” So we talked about how it was likely that many if not most people would not be happy with the bank or other creditor and might well think that they deserved more favorable terms of repayment. It still seemed clear that the idea of strike debt, let alone a debt strike, was something that made her quite uncomfortable.

Nor did anyone at the theatre who was not part of OWS recognize the red square that I had thought was now widely recognized. I suppose I have naive assumptions that alternative arts people are necessarily aware of political issues, like my friends in OWS and at places like the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. But then most politics people don’t get what’s going on with performance.

Right now, Occupy Theory has two slogans for Phase Two.

From base to disperse.

From Occupy to strike.

The point is that these are goals, not statements of what has been achieved. It’s a change of approach. Projects like this make me feel both that we have a long way to go and that making progress with it, at least at first, won’t be as hard as you might think.

 

 

 

No holiday from debt

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Today was a long rehearsal for “Yours In Debt!” in a slightly less sweltering Manhattan that was almost empty of locals for the day. I’ve always liked being around performers and I enjoy their confidence and their physical poise, not qualities I notably associate with myself. Being around those that do raises your own standards.

This performance about debt is not without the usual tensions and contradictions in the creative industries. There’s not much by way of resources and, at least to go by one of the performer’s monologues today, there’s no pay for the actors–or myself, of course, I wouldn’t ask for it and would donate it to the others if offered. At the Debt Assembly last week, a young actress described the Catch-22 of her situation. She has substantial student debt from her acting degree so if she takes any work that she would like to do, all her pay would go to debt.

When we were throwing out words to respond to today, I noticed the performers all found an extra edge when I said “MFA.” These terminal degrees in the arts rarely come with financial support beyond some TA work but that does not mean they are cheap. That said, the musical, physical and performance skills on display today were impressive. It’s not that these courses don’t teach people how to do what they want to do, which makes the double-bind of debt all the more oppressive. One of the group had turned down a top program at the New School, despite the opportunities it offered, to avoid the debt burden.

So while I had thought that working in a hot dark room for several hours was not the perfect way to spend a holiday, on the other hand, perhaps it was. What could be more American than this tense mixture of aspiration, talent, frustration, debt and politics? In all of this, I am supposed to be The Expert. In many ways, we are all experts in this field.

 

 

A Walk on the West Side

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New York is a very parochial city. You tend to stay where you feel comfortable and move in a set of familiar patterns. Today I was out of my comfort zone all over the West side, observing a new corporate district emerging and engaging in some rehearsals for a performance at the end of the week.

Today began with a walk back down the High Line from 30th Street, where I left my car to be fixed with a great group of guys from Côte d’Ivoire. They got a huge kick out of the fact that I speak French, which is apparently not common in their usual clientele of South Asian taxi drivers and New York City officials. It was a place that I fetched up at because of Yelp!  As is not uncommon in global cities of the South, this shop actually fixes things, albeit in an improvised fashion. I usually feel wildly out of place in US car places, where it is really obvious I don’t do mainstream masculinity at all well. Here was fine, we talked about the European soccer championships and made fun of people in French.

The casual improvised feel could not be more removed from the High Line. It has extended Chelsea’s art district north and allows for walkers to see works displayed in non-traditional spaces. So there was a large portrait by JR, the French art-ivist, as he calls himself on the back wall of a house. Usually I love JR’s stuff but one piece by itself seemed out of place, just another commercial display. Even early in the morning, the High Line crawls with people, mostly tourists, all taking extensive photographs.

At the north end, there’s a massive building project going on over the West Side railyards. Two full city blocks are being converted into the usual mix of offices, high-end apartments and retail outlets with one or two affordable places in undesirable locations thrown in as a sop. One site is being developed by our old friends Brookfield Properties. This site, which they are calling Manhattan West was announced on September 2, 2011, just two weeks before OWS moved into Zuccotti Park. It stretches from 31st to 33rd Streets and from 9th to Dyer Avenue. It’s huge. When you see the scale of all this, it’s amazing to think that Occupy has had any impact at all.

From there I had to go up to Columbia University to rehearse for what is being billed as a performative lecture on debt in the series Debt! hosted by undergroundzeronyc, a theater festival. The project brings together directors from Eastern Europe, with performers and lecturers from New York. Our project, “Yours In Debt!“, is being co-ordinated by Ida Daniel, from Bulgaria, whose work, so far as I have seen it, seems very much influenced by Brecht and behind him Kafka. The performance we’re doing has an Expert and Assistants, and the latter were very important characters in Kafka.

Kafka

Just as in Kafka, the Assistants are really in charge of the performance, not because of the way it is structured, so much as because they really are performers. Working on exits and entrances, thinking about cues and so on, you realize how glib the academic use of performative often can be. Applied to ourselves, it means that we do what we do anyway but now with a sexier name. Actually performing feels much harder, even though the topic is one with which I am now only too familiar.

Or is it just rehearsing, trying to work out how to work with people in a space whose dynamics are new? Put like that, it starts to seem more familiar. There is a curious dynamic here by which I began writing about the performativity of Occupy and now I am doing a performance about Occupy. This is what happens if you venture onto the West Side.

A-Anti-Antigonick

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As predicted, Greece is having its Antigone revolution in refusing to abide by the Law in favor of kinship. For the majority who voted for Syriza and other anti-memorandum parties, mutual aid outweighs obligations to creditors. In the first days of this project, you may recall, I was very taken with a reworking of the Antigone legend in the context of the global social movements by Italian performance group Motus. The proper treatment of the dead body was later visualized by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen. And so when the chant “A-Anti-Anticapitalista” became the subject of a later post, I rewrote it in my head in my geeky way to go “A-Anti-Antigone.” Amazon knows that I am interested in Antigone now and when Ann Carson’s new book Antigonick was published this week, they told me. And this was uncanny because I am known as Nick to my friends.

Actually, what the book, a reworked translation of Antigone, is called is open to question. The cover says:

  ANTIGO              NICK

But the inside front page and Library of Congress listing have Antigonick. You won’t notice that at first because you will be admiring the beauty of the book.

The text was hand-inked on the page, in black and red ink [so red in quotes does not now indicate a hyperlink] then photographed–it’s a bit smudgy sometimes but very striking.

Bianca Scott has produced overlay color drawings that intersperse the text on translucent paper. The only book I can remember seeing like this recently was by the artist Cai Guo Qiang and indeed this one was printed in China (no further details are given). Without being unkind, there’s a story about labor, costs and outsourcing there that might interest Antigonick.

Then you notice that this is not at all a literal translation. It begins wonderfully (Carson’s caps):

[ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE] ANTIGONE: WE
BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF
US. ISMENE: WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE: HEGEL
ISMENE:SOUNDS MORE LIKE BECKETT ANTIGONE: HE
WAS PARAPHRASING HEGEL ISMENE: I DON’T THINK
SO

Carson reminds us that a legend is always a question of how you tell it. And that this is a play, a text to be performed. In the list of characters we find:

Nick  a mute part [always onstage, he measures things.]

We’ll come back to him in a minute. The references to Beckett and Hegel tell us that we can’t hear Antigone as if we were ancient Greeks. This is a modern drama now. Isn’t it just.

KREON TO ANTIGONE :YOU KNEW IT WAS AGAINST
THE LAW ANTIGONE:
                 WELL IF YOU CALL THAT LAW

By the unspoken convention (Nick’s measures), words in red have so far indicated the names of characters. It’s not too much to say that the LAW is a character in Antigone. Or it could also be “just” an emphasis. Or it could be an emphasis on the just, over the law.

Such undecidability is of course contrary to Hegel, who held that

in a drama [spiritual powers] enter in their simple and fundamental character and they oppose one another.

It might be thought that the drama of Oedipus was a (literally) classic example. But it depends. In a review in the New York Review of Books (paywall), Peter Green points out that it was held that Oedipus’s father Laius was attracted to:

Pelops’ son Chrysippus, and carried him off in the first (but by no means the last) homosexual abduction known to Greek myth. Pelops cursed Laius; and the latter’s death at the hands of his son, who then unwittingly married his mother Jocasta, was the working out of this curse.

In this version, the Oedipus complex is more complicated and less decidable than it’s usually allowed to be. Again, as Judith Butler has emphasized, when Antigone talks of her brother, she could be describing Oedipus because they share the same mother. The Oedipus complex was always already queer.

And that LAW thing isn’t just the law of the father. Today Alex Tsiras of Syriza said of Greece “we are going directly to hell,” meaning a living death underground. Which is what happened to Antigone. As Carson reminds us, the myth has power today because it still affects us. She uses words like ANARCHY where the standard translation uses “unruly.” She talks of the “state of exception.” How to measure that?

In the nick. In the nick of time. By Nick.

Eurydike, Creon’s wife, mother of Haimon who Antigone was to marry, has famously few lines in Sophocles. One speech, five lines.

Carson has her speak much longer, with a riff on Virginia Woolf. Then she asks a question about Antigone [the spacing isn’t right in the quote, the lines are alternately indented but WordPress won’t allow that measure, sorry]:

BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY
THE
RULE
TO
WHICH
SHE
IS
AN
EXCEPTION                                               IS SHE
AUTOIMMUNE. NO SHE IS NOT.    HAVE YOU HEARD
THE EXPRESSION    THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A
NICK

What indeed? The OED gives us an astonishingly long entry. It refers to a notch, a cut, a groove, whether in a machine, a tool, wood or an animal. It can refer to the vagina, as in various Jacobean dramas cited by OED. Then it is also the precise moment, later the nick of time. It is essential, what is aimed at. You can also go to the nick, a jail or prison, and be beset by Old Nick, the devil.

At the end of the play, NICK still on stage MEASURING. Measuring the collapse of autoimmunity, the collapse of debt’s capital, the capitals of debt.

Like in Beckett, who crops up here, Imagination Dead Imagine:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault.

 

Measuring, counting the debt in the living tomb that is the Troika’s Greece, there we find A-Anti-Antigonick. An odd creature.