The Void on Stage, exploring margins in past and present (2008)

Text Sabine Hillen / Photography Marjolijn Dijkman

An introduction to the collaborative research project The Void on Stage.

Erving Goffman has extended, at the beginning of the sixties, his image of the theatre to all areas of social life. Social behaviour could not be compared to a natural, spontaneous process but it was a matter of staging and performing. Individuals meeting each other in public space prepared themselves to behave like actors; therefore they had to be informed on the background, status and competence of the ones they would meet, characters helping the achievement of their performance. Goffman’s book Frame analysis focused on the frame as a public setting that could be observed; within this frame events unrolled in front of an audience. The more obscure, backstage zone, behind the curtain was comparable to a margin, a space in which performances were prepared or analysed.

Like Goffman we like to think that marginal spaces are not catching the eye. They seem to occur in speechless areas, before or after the interaction.

The image of the theatre is crucial in Goffman’s work, since it is stressing the limitations of observation. Gestures, rituals and the use we make of language don’t give us insight to the true emotion or sincere confession of the actor. The actors we seem to be are compelled to coded situations. We seem forced, whether we want it or not, to express ourselves and this expression is only creating an impression. Social roles and representation provoke theatrical effects and influence others . If reality is in itself already a fictional construction, this also explains why it is involving the field of aesthetics.

We would like to start our reflection on the theatrum mundi by means of the opposition Willem Schinkel has questioned recently: can philosophers and artists go on using the opposition between the public scene and the backstage zone, between the majority on one side and what is marginal, not integrated on the other? And what does this imply for the field of aesthetics?

According to Schinkel this binary tension between the marginal and the non-marginal shows how contemporary society has arrived in an impasse. Most individuals today cope with a reinforced normative discourse imposing flexibility, digitalisation, life-long learning and the needs of economic growth. If culturists compare societies to organic totalities and bodily structures, they do not want to take into consideration how this social body is approaching its own death. Falling into pieces, caught in an endless self-observation, society is obsessively separating the known from the unknown. This unending distinction between norms and their exception, between life on stage and the shelters backstage is what Schinkel calls hypochondria: a society can be obsessed by its own diseases, hoping for a state of perfect health, without accepting its limitations. The reasons of our discomfort are not due to the errors of our social organisation. No, they find their cause outside the borders of Europe. One can be European like one can be the member of a club. It is only a matter of respecting the rules.
And yet, so many rules seem to hunt our shadow.

Maybe contemporary aesthetics has to start from the acknowledgement of a void stage. Our industrialised space seems to offer a predictable, uniform drama, with little narrative and only a few surprises. If a proper space can be defined as a room recollecting identity, social relations and history, a space not willing to cope with identity, relations and history has to be called, according to Marc Augé, a non lieu. Due to this triple negation, the theatrum mundi is now, according to us, not integrating memory, identity and social relations . We live in a world where people are born and die into clinics, where transit zones and temporary occupations increase, a world where nature is colonized and public transports potential danger zones. We would like to know to what extent void spaces remain zones fulfilling our fears and which strategies we use to overcome this.

The margin: a border between the known and the unknown

For Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) emptiness was related to images of the outside world. This world was extended beyond the frontiers of domesticated territories. Was empty, in that case, “what was dangerously unknown”: the horizon of the sea, the forest with animals, natural areas to discover. The margin seemed a visible line distinguishing known from unknown spaces.

If travellers were threatened by their surrounding, they expelled their fear by carrying signs of their home with them. Art was not only a matter of status. It’s aura offered protection. By means of pictures travelling became less fearful. If turtles had the advantage of carrying their homes wherever they went, tattoos offered the same advantage. Originally they gave to explorers the home they were missing. Even if some aristocrats loved being tattooed, most inscriptions were linked to specific spaces: the ship leaving for the colonies, the army travelling in deserts or mountains, murderers and thieves being kept in a long-term detention.

Often the inscriptions on the skin exorcised the difficult living conditions of the travels, the fights, the crimes and the incarceration. This was not so much a matter of knowledge, but more a question of faith and belief. The inscriptions mentioned the names of one or more lovers, the quarter the owners grew up in as a child, the ship they belonged too. Even linguistic commonplaces were used and they appeared on arms, legs or backs.

The study of Alexandre Lacassagne, which was achieved in the south of France in 1881, mentions very frequent expressions pour la vie (I will remember it as long as I live), enfant du malheur (for children born of wedlock). The words were often rendered in dialect, sometimes with spelling and grammar mistakes; tattooing was illegal before the invention of O’Reilly’s tattoo-needle.

The tattooed inscription was not only the autobiographical reminder of a land, city or state, it was also a form of primitive writing borrowed from animistic beliefs. According to this cultural context, drawing and writing equalled believing in the power of signs but also expelling the unknown. If the world was a theatre, pictures were used to conquer the unknown. Their power increased the strength and the belief of the beholder.

Tattoos inscriptions could make absent things become present and once they did, chase dangers away. Edouard V. from Marseilles had a cross and some biblical scenes tattooed on his chest and back. Before leaving for the battlefield and being unable to go to a church, he opened his shirt and prayed.

The margin: not only a spatial but also a social issue

At the beginning of the 19th century, the centre becomes the place of authority, reason and public speech. This full centre is also creating a gap with repressed discourse, exceptions to the main rule, voices remaining silent, without representation.

In the studies of Lacassagne and Prinzhorn madness is still confined to restricted areas, outside the theater of the world. This restricted area was still called asylum or in French hospice although patients were no longer considered as guests. The asylum installed new forms of community life, the institution functioned like a gatekeeper, distinguishing the ones who could take part to social life from the ones who had to remain locked up.

The asylum installed new forms of community life but it was not reproducing the roles of the social stage. From 1830 onwards, mental illness was regarded as a physical and moral deviation, a violent attitude that needs correction. For the sake of science, the monstrous proportions of the illness are exposed on a stage: this exposure of the body starts already in the amphitheatres of Anastasius Kircher (1671) and continues with Charcot and Latourette in La Salpétrière (1880) . The margin is no longer a spatial frontier. It slowly becomes a space whit banned forms of behaviour, communities dealing with people not corresponding to the expectations. Medical knowledge is at that time making spectators aware of the distance between the normal and the abnormal.

The margin: a void in the center

The liberation of madness starts in Zurich at the early twenties of past century and continued until the sixties, through the letters of Artaud and the pictures of Aloïse Corbaz who had been cured for a long time. The process of liberation was [therefore] a therapy that did not repress the realm of incoherence, delusion and hallucination, but was willing to integrate it in society. Instead of curing mental illness and restricting it to separated areas, one tried to stimulate patients to act in society. As an example one can think of the experiments in Guislain hospital of Ghent, the San Giacomo Hospital in Verona, the state colony in Geel that enabled patients to live near the asylum.

Mental patients were no longer treated as victims of degeneration or illness. Madness obtained an exaggerated positive image: patients in the role of mind readers, visionary subjects able to see what is only revealed at second sight. What Steven De Batselier will call the “psychopathological syndrome of normal society”, is based on an idea first formulated by surrealism in 1924: “We who love [madness] understand that the insane refuse to be cured. We know well that it is we who are locked up when the asylum door is shut: the prison is outside the asylum, liberty is to be found inside” (Paul Eluard). Some decades later De Batselier would not hesitate to see the insane as models of a visionary state of being. According to him, their behaviour is immune to organized forms of power, indifferent to sex stereotyping and the roles Goffman would expect. Patients could still approach reality with astonishment. Normal society, on the other hand, had to cope with isolation, submission and repressed forms of emotion.

Besides this romantic interpretation of mental illness, the surrealist view remains interesting from a strictly spatial perspective. If the void was a space located in the margin of a centre, this centre was, at the end of the 19e and the beginning of the 20e centuries, becoming the blind spot of an impossible gathering. From the twenties until the sixties, some spatial shifts appear. What was located at the border, often in a space considered empty, closed or unknown, invaded the centre.

Many social differences seem to disappear when Schinkel erases the gap between normative behaviour and margin. And yet, can we believe that our society, when it is dealing with its own ending, is chasing away void spaces? Mircea Cantor made in 2003 a twenty-two minute video called “The landscape is changing”:

The camera tracks a group of protesters moving through the streets of Tirana, Albania. The dozen or so young men and women are shown marching down sidewalks (…) sometimes with police escort. Otherwise an orderly demonstration (…) the participants hold mirrored posters overhead, inexplicably. Their surfaces appear abstract, merely reflecting back the urban environment, curiously articulating no apparent demands. The signs in fact undermine the language of protest (…) and replace it with ambiguity (…). The landscape is changing indeed (T.J. Demos).

Changing in what way? The void has found its place in the centre. It is hidden in an excess of language that erases all language, stuck in an amount of data that only have the appearance of language. In this chaos, what is full and what is empty, what is central and what is marginal seem to withdraw from stable positions. Cantor shows us not only an absence of language, but also moving blank spaces, built with mirrors. These mirrors tend in the first place to reproduce images of the city instead of making new ones and therefore generate entropic tendencies without any dreams. Today many of us believe art has to have political and critical implications. But what can we do when people obey and the space of believing is empty?