This research explores the notion of ‘liveness’ in visual and performing arts in relation to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
The title is borrowed partially from the late artist Ian White’s use of the term ‘liveness’ in his essay ‘Performer, Audience, Mirror: Cinema, Theatre and the Idea of the Live’ (2012): ‘thinking cinema and theatre together, they might be the means by which liveness could be further described … as the product of an extraordinary kind of negation.’ And partially from a line in the introduction of philosopher Joan Copjec’s book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994): ‘“The” pleb does not exist; but there is “plebness.”’ Namely, there is no concrete, actual pleb corresponding to a flesh-and-bones person but there is a phenomenon that shows the limit of a given system (corresponding, too, to the philosophical distinction between ‘to exist’ and ‘there is’ in logic).
White’s enigmatic essay asks what happens when chronology is cut, and cinema expands. This research brings the liveness of expanded cinema (by which I also refer to performance art, in line with White) into dialogue with psychoanalytic theory, whose encounter has so far been inexistent or superficial (Bishop, Mulvey, et al.). Questions: how does the present appear? How is consciousness of the present produced? How does desire mobilise the present? Not the present of commodities (always more), but the evanescent present. The first is the present of infinite duration, the insatiable doctrine of the superego, embodied by the promise of progress without end or by the executioner (one might think of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die philosophy). The second kind of present relates to a temporality whose very limit opens the question of the subject (Che vuoi?) as an indeterminate end in itself (Copjec), conscious of death and not deadening (one might think of filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Blue [1993]).
Working closely with Copjec’s theorising of the present in her essay ‘Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism,’ (2019) and theories put forward in her edited volume Radical Evil (1996), we can ask: How does the effacement of the evanescent present by the endless present relate to the new totalitarianism? Artworks, whether plastic like sculpture or ephemeral like performance, are forms of reply to the question of the evanescent present and they must be deciphered, as in psychoanalysis; artworks suppose the social, what Copjec calls a common language, meaning it can be debated by others. Theatre is a stage for the present and at the same time the negation of the present, as are galleries, lecture halls and other framing apparatuses; in this way they can serve as models (like the psychoanalytic session) in which the immediacy (Kornbluh) of the present of commodities is suspended in order to think. What we see in the culture of the endless present is erosion of the ‘stage,’ which is the place of the subject.
Picture: Sara Deraedt