Response Paper

Fredric Jameson’s use of schizophrenia in his description of elements of post modernity he quotes from a description of the disease in Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl and points to the heightened materiality of the subject’s world. Jameson goes on to state: “What I want to underscore, however, is precisely the way in which the signifier in isolation becomes ever more material—or, better still literal.” In this way he concludes “As meaning is lost the materiality of words becomes obsessive, as is the case when children repeat a world over and over again until its sense is lost and it becomes an incomprehensible incantation. To begin to line up with out earlier description, a signifier that has lost its signified has thereby been transformed into an image.”

In the article “The Deaf Gaze” we are reminded that Robert Wilson’s theatre is a place in which the act of seeing is arrested from its normal transactions:

And it is indeed as if something that had always disturbed the gaze, some old complicity between the gaze and the world had all at once been undone on the stage of a theatre. An old complicity that prevented us (through some excess, through some defect) from seeing simply what can’t be seen, from taking in what is there for us to see.

In Jameson’s formulation the schizophrenic and in his estimation postmodern mindset is one that forces language into materiality that is then transformed into image as the link between signifier and signified is severed. Wilson’s theatre creates a “deaf gaze,” a gaze whose action is an undoing of the traditional transaction between sight and meaning. Both lead to radical reorientations towards space and time. “The Deaf Gaze” reminds us: “Wilson has repeated it over and over again: space is a horizontal line, and time a vertical line that goes from the heights of the sky to the centre of the earth (Ostria, 1994). Jameson places the schizophrenic state of one as one that forces temporal discontinuity into language. He compares this to John Cage’s music “the hearing of a single chord or note followed by a silence so long that memory cannot hold on to what went before, a silence then banished into oblivion by a new strange sonorous present which itself disappears.” Wilson’s removal of time from the linear progression of the horizontal line which he now replaces with space disrupts, in much the same way as Jameson’s schizophrenic notions of time, any sense of progression—instead what emerges is the present moment framed by silences that drop into his “vertical time.” The reality of the stage takes on the hyper-reality that transforms into the unreality of Jameson’s schizophrenic girl wherein the present moment seemingly progresses without end moment by moment leading to what many have termed the trance-like quality that Wilson’s work contains.

Jameson’s concern for the word turned irrelevant, material, and then pure image contrasted next to Wilson’s embracing of the “deafman glance,” of image divorced from linear time and restored to a vertical state of interrelatedness brings to the fore the several strains of articles we have read relating to the postmodern. On the one hand seems to be an anxiety to somehow tether the postmodern onto the horizontal line of time wherein the artistic impulse has instead tried to free this tethering and redefine time vertically. However, this impulse, as is pointed out again and again, is tied always to the modern, its texts, philosophy and art. Wilson himself returns to texts and forms of the modern despite what many theorize are his postmodern tendencies. Jameson’s use of schizophrenia as a point of reference to postmodernism’s unmooring of meaning and time and Wilson’s beginnings being so much tied to deafness and autism begin to posit an idea of the postmodern tied closely to perception and its infinite reordering of the “real.” For Jameson, schizophrenia seemingly poses a threat to sense and meaning, whereas for Wilson deafness seemingly holds an offering to the image loosed from time.