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A very interesting lecture indeed by photographer and activist Sara Davidmann, PhD and Researcher at LCC London, who showed us ((MA in Photography and Urban Culture at Goldsmiths)) many photos from her collection of visual ethnography with transgender and transsexual people. Her fairly recent paper, Border Trouble: photography, strategies, and transsexual identities, offers a good background to the discussion and gives an idea of the very important issues at stake. Last, but not least, ethical issues around visual representation, power relationships in portraiture photography, the potential for photography to constitute a critical/technological intervention, and performativity in public and private (e. g. studio) spheres.

But, I want to highlight two other things that particularly struck me: the issue of in/visibility and the conundrum of language vs. practise. The former opens on a consideration of symbolic representation and ownership of own image in the visual public sphere. Transgender people are willing to become invisible, Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence the urge to comply with the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push deviance to the safe border of psy-disciplines as well as towards surgery: the idea being of ‘fixing’ the wrong bodies. The paradox is completed when, looking at the incredible series of pictures taken over years by Davidmann, the private sphere is then perceived safe enough to let the proper self be as it wants to be.  Which one is the social performance for transsexual people, the public ‘norm’ or the ‘passing’? Thus, unsettling dramatically notion of performance.

The other issue I found particularly poignant is the insistence on the inadequacy of our language categories (most notably written texts) to describe and hence make acceptable – so at least it would sound – situations at the border, in-between binary constructions. Yes, it is true we need to equip ourselves of a new language, and to go beyond the binary distinction of gender, as well as of sex, but I think this is not enough. I borrow an expression from Thrift (2008), according to whom: ‘Practices are property of the practises themselves, not of the actors’. Let’s look at the problem of the public toilets, the embarrassment or difficulty of going to the loo in a gendered world: two signs on the door of the cinema or the pub, no other chance. The  action, which any of us has to perform at least a few times a day, and to which most of us do not pay attention as it is taken for granted, might become a big issue for some people.

Pace Judith Butler, the social construction of gender is a practical experience lived day by day, and involves all sort of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, defences, and so on. Davidmann’s critical and militant photography seems to me to do more and better.

Very interesting stuff, provocative and problematic, but full of insights…

Another comment on my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ allows me to expand further on these issues. The commentator remarks that the shot is not candid, since the people are smiling back to the camera as they are aware of the presence of the photographer. As such there is an element of performance or -as I read it – of artificiality in the shot which, in turn, reminds of a ‘symbolic interactionist’ encounter rather than a non-representational one.

My reply is two-fold: on one side, I need to rehearse the issue of poor visual literacy in Sociology, and I will use the artist Jeff Wall to challenge the possibility of ‘true reality’ and objective shots in photography. On the other hand, I will briefly engage on a more sociological terrain of theoretical debates around different notions of performance, which will foreground a discourse on identity. In order to do that, I will use Judith Butler idea of postmodernity applied to gender analysis, the array of criticisms that this position has arisen in Sociology and Gender Studies, and finally I will open to the non-representational idea of performance.

Jeff Wall is famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage. He has been known to spend almost two years on a single picture, with actors and crew to shoot scenes of the everyday ((“And I like to work with commonplace material because I think It’s magical to be able to make a picture that imparts a strong aesthetic experience in spite of unprepossessing subject matter. It’s much more interesting to conjure something out of nothing.”)) . He has used the term ‘cinematography’ to refer to his work, emphasizing the ways in which it has been affected by the various production processes normally identified with filmmaking rather than still photography. He teases out the myth of reality outside perception to the point that he is able to re-create in studio the ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Besson, in which the elements of an external world join together at a decontextualized point, outside time, a pure aesthetic moment ‘when form takes on an essential meaning and used to provide an individualistic rationale for a visual coherence or equilibrium within fragmentary instants’ (( Celia Lury, ‘Prosthetic Culture, 1998:167)): the photographer’s ability is an intuitive gift of the individual, not brought into being by socio-biological and temporal circumstances. “There’s a fine line between fact and fiction, between a moment and a perfect representation of that moment” – Wall said. His best work comes from never having to choose ((“Once I understood that there was a means to introduce a form of theatre, or artifice, into photography, it also open the door to understanding that this theatricality was compatible with the ‘documentary style’ of street photography. Mimic (1982) was my move to try to bring street photography and ‘cinematography’ together.”)) .

I want to use his work here to criticize the idea of performative aspects of identity as expression of never ending exercise of will, disconnected from the web of social practices, context and history, in which they are embedded, sometimes identified with Judith Butler’s postmodern critique of gender: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a “natural” kind of being” (Butler, 1990: 33). Although Butler does not discuss language, it is easy to see how speech in particular might be analysed as a ‘repeated stylization of the body’.

As Lois McNay (2004) explains: ‘Essentially, the problem with J. Butler’s account of performative agency is that it is not an account of agency per se, but an account of some of the discoursive pre-conditions that must prevail for certain type of linguistic innovation to be possible. Butler posits agency as a property of language conceived as an abstract structure, rather than a situated type or action or interaction. [This notion of agency doesn't] address adequately enough how agency is determined by access to symbolic and material resources’ ((L. McNay, Agency and Experience, 2004)) . On the other hand, Bourdieu situates his agents in social and symbolic space, in which ‘actors occupy positions within the social fields that are determined both by the distribution of resources within a given field and also by the structural relations between that field and others’ (ibidem). Crucially the inscriptions of these social positions within and among fields are carried over by the bodies of the subjects (as well as material objects and their interactions with the subjects, I shall add), what is known as Habitus, a pre-reflexive disposition of the body. In Bourdieu’s dynamic model, the representation of the selves and of the others (the symbolic) informs the actions and interactions of the agents, but in turn, these representations are contextualised to the extent that are determined by the social structures.

And isn’t there a performative element in each of us which reflect our own subjectivity into a mirror of representational norms? What is often called mimesis? I think that, if would be unreasonable to deny this (babies as old as 41 minutes have been seen as imitating), on the other hand, it would seem superficial ((since agents are generally understood to identify with norms or, perhaps better said, an agreement between the dispositions of agents and the demands of a field is generally assumed’ Lisa Adkins about Bourdieu’s notion of practice, 2004)) not to consider the iterative interplay between these classifying norms and the ever emergent, incomplete identity (‘ambivalent mimesis’ for Lisa Adkins, 2004). Social imaginaries, in other words, cannot be contained (Thrift, 2008: 12). And would it be a good interviewing practice to prompt the informants, in order to make them come out from the shell of their representational selves? Isn’t the interview a process, rather than fixed scripts? In other words, we might want to think of the event itself as a disruption of the theoretical framework. Besides, most of social interaction is exactly that: a joint action, able to work across different social fields, often in an adaptive and unconscious manner. In other words, I maintain, practices are not propriety of actors but of the practices themselves. On the other hand, though, there is a sense in which the studio or the laboratory provides a very poor metaphor to be able to capture the complexity of the world: so to say, the body cannot contain all. There is always an emergent element of free-play, a ‘personal authorship’ ((Thrift, 2008)) that comes out from the ongoing creation of affects, through encounters. In this sense, performance is central for non-representational theory. As Thrift (2008) remarks:

‘Nearly every action is reaction to joint action, to being-as-a-pair, to the digestion of the intricacies of talk, body language, even an ambient sense of the situation to hand…this is why Non-representational Theory privileges play: play is understood as a perpetual human activity with immense affective significance…Practices are the productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world: they are not therefore propriety of actors but of the practices themselves. Actions presuppose practices and not vice versa… A non-representational outlook depends upon understanding and working with the everyday as a set of skills, which are highly performative’.

In this sense the metaphor of the mime is a pertinent one: the actors are going out in a specific place, they cannot use any words, just facial expression, their bodies and of course objects. We don’t know what and how they are going to perform. And especially what kind of audience they are going to meet: we can only guess.