Habeas corpus: fictions...
- Authorship
- Óscar Cornago
- Original language
- Spanish
- Query time
- > 10' < 30'
- Date
- 2023
- Age range
- > 18
- Format
- Article
Habeas corpus: fictions, tricks and documents
We are asked for clarity, efficacy and transparency. To speak about what is really happening in the world. You have to employ your body, the ultimate proof of a palpable truth. All of this, which was revolutionary one century ago, appears today enveloped in easily identifiable formulas serving an agenda that constantly needs to be renamed so it does not loose its novelty. It is not only about politics, but also economics and the market. On the opposite side there is still an idea of fiction as a way out, escapism or a refuge, an imaginary characteristic of bourgeois culture. This polarity explains the direction of performance in the twentieth century. Fiction and performance, imagination and body, are at opposite poles. This dichotomy, which seems to make a clear distinction between what is real and what is invented, has only been accentuated as the social agenda has been imposed.
Fiction is neutralised when it is detached from a context, just like documents without an operation that decentres them, unbalances them, gives them life, reduces them to elements in a theoretical construction, a form of argumentation.
The imagination is unleashed when things are dislocated and bodies encounter each other—for good or for bad; it is not a form of evasion but a means of survival, bodies that are no longer just subjects or objects, humans and nonhumans, but intermediate powers, desires, vertexes and displacements that sustain a poetic fiction; and fictions that activate a movement of suspension and confrontation with the most immediate and the most distant at the same time.
However, fiction is neutralised when it is detached from a context, just like documents without an operation that decentres them, unbalances them, gives them life, reduces them to elements in a theoretical construction, a form of argumentation. The body, subject to the passage of time, emotions and affects, makes us fragile; it is what we know the least; it is the object of constant social vigilance. Fictions are born from the confrontation of their limits, overflows, desires and exploitations: fictions to decolonise the body.
In 1966, the intellectual Argentine artist Oscar Masotta displayed 40 people who appeared indigent in front of an audience for one hour, illuminated by the bright light of reflectors and subjected to a constant, high-pitched sound. At the beginning, he explained that they were hired through an agency that paid them each 400 pesos to allow themselves to be watched; he added that he later gave them 200 more pesos, that the public should pay 200 pesos for looking at them and that all of this would generate a circulation of money in which he was the mediator. To Induce the Spirit of the Image is a montage that is theatrical because of the play of distances Masotta deploys around a fiction, something which is both true and a lie. This fiction places the system of authorities that usually organise the world inside parentheses. The circulation of meanings that the work activates is part of an economic circulation, a circulation of forms of exchange that make reality an uncertain, open-ended, unfinished place. It is the place of history when it is suspended.
Action, performance and bodies are revealed as transitional spaces between people and things, subjects and objects, the real and the imaginary; they are the place of desire, of what used to be and what might have been, where fictions are born.
Habeas corpus is a legal concept that points to the body as the last resort when faced with illegal arrest, the last guarantee of rights. In Latin it is expressed in the subjunctive; it doesn’t say you have a body it says if you had a body, as if the opportunity of having a body came from a desire from the other and for the other, for that other who is left with nothing other than their own corporality. Here’s hoping that at that time you’re at least left with your body. In legal terms, an undocumented person is a body without authority, which appears as a document in the limit of the document, the threshold that makes all limits obvious, the limits of law, politics and art. This is why the arts ended up reaching the body as proof of truth. Action, performance and bodies are revealed as transitional spaces between people and things, subjects and objects, the real and the imaginary; they are the place of desire, of what used to be and what might have been, where fictions are born. Documentary is the others; I am the fiction, says Godard. I always thought that it might be the opposite: I am the documentary, the others are the fiction. In reality it doesn’t matter, because in both cases the same operation takes place: separating and isolating the exterior of the world from the interior of the self, reality from fiction, documentary from poetry, politics from bodies.
Fiction, the act and effect of feigning, says the dictionary; however, we prefer the latter, to understand it as an effect, not as an action, here and now, and feigning is in the negative, as a lack or dearth of something, of certainty, of truth. Compared to the economy of ends, the perspective of action points to an economy of means which puts the ends in parentheses; as an act, fiction is not an end but a means that unleashes a movement. The same holds true with the document when it is considered the act of producing, showing and circulating a material, not only what it represents.
The 1970s are comparable to the current moment in terms of the demand of social reality; however, the contexts are different. That reality that used to be on the streets and beating at the walls of institutions is now requested from the institutions, which have filled a space that they did not use to have, imposing more rigid, urgent and directed forms of production and communication which condition relations, procedures and attitudes. At that time, the option was not to reject fictions but to plan a tactic, activate a movement from the margins. Today it is to restore rights to the margins, to bodies as uncertain documents, as spaces of risk, opacity and vagueness, capable of being opened to equally liminal forms of everything that remains outside, forms which resist the demand for transparency, visibility and legibility that define the institutions (of capitalism).
Fictions and realities intersect to activate a machinery that then gave rise to other forms of dramatic writing. Hamletmachine, 1977, one of the icons of twentieth-century theatre, works in this way as a document of a period and an operating manual. It is a laboratory of social fantasy, says its author, Heiner Müller. The starting point is well known: ‘I was Hamlet’, but no longer: ‘I play no role anymore. […] My drama is cancelled’ (p. 177). It veers away from drama to deploy a movement that goes back to making the improbably of theatre possible: ‘My drama, if it could yet take place…’. This displacement multiplies, scatters and confounds identities:
I am the typewriter. I tie the noose, when the leaders are hanged, kick the stool away, break my neck. I am my own prisoner. I feed my data into the computer. My roles are spit and spittoon knife and wound teeth and gum neck and gallows (p. 179).
Müller reinvents the possibility of poetry, drama and history in the potential time that opens a conditional taken to the stage if it could yet take place. That time is the era of strife and the strife begins, he says, with an ‘urban promenade. Against the traffic regulation’. The fiction also begins against the traffic regulation. While the ‘Actor playing Hamlet’ says these words, the theatre technicians install three TVs and a refrigerator, a type of set that would become the hallmark of what is called post-dramatic theatre decades later. Movement will become style, stamp, fashion trend; it will halt; reality will be captured once again, disabled, awaiting another movement, other fictions, other tricks.
In the early twentieth century, Benjamin turned the document into a hieroglyphic of the present; essential, something that goes through the senses. Without a body with the ability to feel, travel or move, there is no reality, nor are there fictions; there are just empty representations, stereotypes, clichés. Class privileges. The opacity of objects is revealed at the same time as the opacity of bodies and the tricks of the first person, which the German philosopher, incidentally, always tried to avoid.
The document refers to an authority that showcases it. The witness, too, puts the authority of a body into play. The means are different, but the ends are comparable. The body document and the bodyless document have the same need for legitimacy, but from different angles. Through the ways they are used, the apparatus holding the document and the experience to which the witness refers turn into two ways of authorising a discourse. They are forms of production of (an effect of) reality. Talking about authorities is ultimately talking about (authorised) subjects versus (unauthorised) subjects. Putting the authority of documents or witnesses at risk, which is the work done by art with the archive, the document and the ways history is told, does not mean stripping them of authority but giving them the opportunity to regain the complexity of that which they refer to.
Imagining is re-creating realities that have lost the ability to be anything other than what they were. The imagination is like a tickle in the head.
Fictions took time before shifting to paper, and when they did so it was more for practical reasons and rights (the text is the site of authorship) than for issues related to use. Even though today we identify them with the world of literature and individual reading, for centuries fictions were subject to a space, people and the specific times in which they were recreated. Imagining is re-creating realities that have lost the ability to be anything other than what they were. The imagination is like a tickle in the head. It begins when bodies fold, scatter, join and multiply. They are the bodies that create in a fiction, create it and make it credible. Religions are the best example of the power that a fiction can have. It is a temporary, contingent pact between one or several people, bodies, places, things that are placed and displaced. Theatre particularly showcases this fictional (dis)encounter-pact, although unlike religions it does not aspire to another reality or authority than what emanates from the time when it occurs. These pacts do not occur solely in public environments of celebration and artistic creation, theatres and other social fora, but they occur spontaneously every time reality is outstripped, upset, suspended, although that does not mean that we perceive that moment as an act of violence from which we must protect ourselves. They are occasions to hurl ourselves in, to feel them and to learn through what we feel; they are occasions for knowledge and flavours. Violence, felt as a danger to one’s own integrity, renders impossible the play of distances needed to put into play the reality of the unreal of fictions, bodies and documents.
In 2006, Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, from a primarily Muslim country, Lebanon, asked Who’s Afraid of Representation? They transferred this question to the Western setting. Are religions afraid of representation? Is the West afraid of representation? Yet the theme of the play is not representation but violence, or the ways it is represented, the religious violence of the Middle East, the artistic violence of Western performance. However, a play is also a game. Who’s afraid of games?
The problem is not representations but the lack of awareness of what is (not) being represented, which ends up reinforcing the distances, stereotypes and privileges; the privilege of continuing to set the boundaries between reality and fiction.
In its righteous desire to overcome distances, prejudices and hierarchies, the Western scene displays and is displayed behind the apparent transparency of documents and the truth of the first person, with neither games nor fictions, with neither drama nor poetry. Yet the problem is not representations but the lack of awareness of what is (not) being represented, which ends up reinforcing the distances, stereotypes and privileges; the privilege of continuing to set the boundaries between reality and fiction. In trying to reject fictions, reality is what ends up reduced to another kind of fiction, yet a consensual one: fictions to say ‘amen’.
When the Brazilian artist Renata Carvalho goes down almost nude from the seating area and invites the audience to touch their trans body, things begin to get moving, not only in the head but also in bodies, the space, the audience, the situation. As if that were not enough, they add a question: When you look at me, what do you see? A trans person or a woman? The controversy is served. Renata’s body is not only a reality but a dream that gives meaning to a movement, an ideal, a project of struggle and resistance. Without this poetic charge, their work Transpophagic Manifesto would just be a pedagogical play that talks about realities but teaches lessons. Reality is not a lesson but a movement. Uncertain, unlikely. This instant is when the fiction of the theatre pact destabilises a social machinery which is temporarily exposed, suspended, vulnerable.
We know the type of knowledge that we can expect when we attend a gathering of sociologists, biologists or economists, but we do not know the type of knowledge that art can give us. Providing a simplified summary of what sociologists, biologists or economists have told us is not tantamount to generating knowledge but instead just transmitting information.
In 2009, I attended one of the presentations of The Atlas Group archive by Walid Raad on the history of Lebanon. It was the time when documentaries were storming onto the theatre scene as part of a series of movements inside the institutions which were seeking new bridges with the world outside. The discourse of the arts as a form of investigation gained solid ground within that context. I spent the play asking myself whether it was a real lecture or a trick, whether it was true or theatre, the fiction of a lecture or a lecture on the fiction of an investigation, or all of that at the same time. Those years were also the time when the term ‘performance lecture’ became fashionable to signal the intermediate space between academia and art, the world of legitimised knowledge and the world of artistic knowledge. The traps of binary approaches.
The file I Only Wish I Could Weep from The Atlas Group archive contains the recordings of an officer in the Lebanese intelligence service. He is handling a surveillance camera concealed in a fast-food van parked in a place known as the Corniche on the seafront in the western part of Beirut. The agent is dismissed for turning the camera lens every evening right at sunset to record that moment. However, he is allowed to keep the recordings, which he sent by post to the Atlas team in 2002. They later learned that the officer had spent the war in east Beirut, where the sunset cannot be seen. Fictions as a form of survival. The fact that Walid Raad and Rabih Mroué turn to fiction to recount the context of violence in the Middle East is no coincidence.
Chance, play, scattering, fragmentation, contrast, suspension, drift, humour and imagination are ways of putting the authorities between parentheses, and this is why they are also the means of fiction.
We would like reality to be more solid, more evident, more striking, more transparent; we would like to be able to name it more easily, predict it, organise it. And because we cannot, we enter urgently. And the urgency turns into another (authorised) fiction-trick which excludes any other form of "reality" fiction.
In his 1967 essay ‘I Committed a Happening’, Masotto offers a condemnation of totalitarianism concealed in the dilemma of art or compromise.
Óscar Cornago
CSIC, Madrid
References
Müller, Heiner. ‘Máquina Hamlet’, Teatro escogido I. Translated by Jorge Riechmann. Madrid, Act I, 1990, pp. 173-182.
Header image
Oscar Masotta's performance Para inducir al espíritu de la imagen, 1966. © Cloe Masotta y Susana-Lijtmaer