Title: “Short Circuits of Desire:” Language andPower in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life
Abstract: In Attempts on Her Life, Martin Crimp's most experimental play to date, a series of actors try to represent a woman called and by so doing, they engage in a process of constructing and recreating a contemporary subjectivity. Anne is both central figure and absent figure around which play centres, insofar as audience does not have a referent against which to contrast actors' verbal constructions. Neither are actors defined as characters, since their lines do not offer any glimpses into their personalities. These structural devices are employed so that language and its ideological representations of human beings and social relations may be foregrounded. The actors, then, construct mystery of identity verbally, through improvization, and in so doing, they lay bare different discursive possibilities contained in telling of a story. They make visible different ideological twists and turns that discourse and representation can take, and depict how speakers activate and choose among a set of ideological positions as they construct meaning. Anne is fragmented into seventeen different aspects of herself, or into seventeen different women (a terrorist, a suicide artist, a porn actress) and things (a car, an ashtray). The ultimate aim of such a multiplicity of perspectives is, I will argue, to unfix discourse and to prove there is no single way of telling a story, a thesis that stands in sharp opposition to context of global politics play directly challenges. In this sense, play is not story of a character, as title at first suggests, but story of a process of identity construction. Indeed, play not only encourages audience to think that Anne might be more than one character, but also to conceive absence of any specific subjectivity at heart of play, reducing Anne's real identity to that of a linguistic artifice, with no external reality or fixed subject position. This article argues that play dramatizes construction of a fictitious subject through regulatory and sanctioning role of language. At same time, however, play responds to creation of archetypes through specific strategies of resistance (by dramatizing an actor's collapse, for example), and through deconstructive, linguistic disruptions that appear throughout play. These strategies aim at making evident social mechanisms of subjectification or of creation of subjects in and through discourse, exerted through disciplinary devices. As Miguel Morey affirms in his introduction to Michel Foucault's conversations on power, Un dialogo sobre el poder y otras conversaciones, repression and ideology are only power's most extreme manifestations: the constant of power is that it is exerted through a technical transformation of individuals ... In our societies, technical transformation of individuals--this production of real--receives name of normalisation. It is modern form of bondage (11). (1) In same vein, Foucault affirms in The Archaeology of Knowledge that discourses are not mere groupings of signs, of signifying elements which remit to contents or representations, but practices which systematically form objects of which they (81). If discourses which fix significations (and thus, exert power) are socially accepted, then we can speak of institutionalized forms of power and of identity construction. When actors talk about Anne, every register they use in order to do so (song, Shakespearean quotations, mythologized language that turns her into an icon, list goes on) is a form of power through which her fiction is created. The subjective fiction actors create is, therefore, an assemblage of different layers of affectation, and supposed subject that emerges is conjunction of these layers. In this context, Anne, absent protagonist, is a registering surface on which processes of identity construction are inscribed, both when these processes are successful and when they enter into crisis, which is expressed through various forms of collapse. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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