The probe-head
Yes the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled.
Deleuze and Guattari12
The probe-head describes a mode of thinking the face’s purpose and function
differently. This requires a rethinking of the majoritarian face and a willingness
to
envisage more than one system of comprehension and function for the face. The
dominant function of the white male face must be negotiated in order that all
faces
currently divergent from the majoritarian face are no longer considered to
be
different from a single facial type but that all faces are considered independently
different.
Thinking about probe-heads relies first on thinking about — and thereby
constructing or subverting — difference. ‘Thinking difference’ requires
the
majoritarian face to represent a temporal, temporary face as only one of many
facial forms. Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘you don’t so much
have a face as
slide into one’,13 referring to pre-established notions of faces into
which one must
fit. Using the traits of the face to forge connections, to differentiate or
extend
rather than affirm meaning (and consequently to differentiate and extend subject
potentials and positions) creates the probe-head. Further, the body must create
its
own facial connexions rather than being forcibly inserted into a structure
that
makes it visible only through a majoritarian form of signification. The body
can
then probe a new, less constrained future instead of sliding into an established
past. To think a facial future, the face must form new alliances and be
reconceptualised through these connections. Deleuze and Guattari call this
the
‘probe-head’.
We can, and should, find examples of these ‘probe-heads’ everywhere.
In a
response to an early version of this paper, Australian feminist Zoë Sofoulis
emphasised the important ‘need to be able to talk about a set of cultural
(dominant
and sub-cultural) systems or sub-systems which, even when “dominant” are
in the
process of change and already harbour subverters within’.14 Certain genres
of
representation seem to lend themselves well to the foregrounding of probe-heads:
horror (monstrous faces, screaming faces), performance art and dance (where
the
focus is on the body’s function), and even theatre and certain films
(the former
makes the face less focal because of the necessary distance between audience
and
performer; the latter frames the face in hyper-close, often fetishistic shots
that
make a traditional face appear otherwise).
For this reason, but located specifically within a context of social difference,
this article now turns to Australian queer performance artist Pluto (formerly
Tristan Shanti). In this interpretation, Pluto’s work explores the different
ways in
which the face can be located upon and as a form of flesh, experienced as both
force and affect rather than comprehensible and legislated surface. Affect,
according to Brian Massumi, is an ‘intensity corresponding to the
passage from
one experiential state of the body to another’;15 Pluto’s work
engages with the
immanence of performance art. The art, but more importantly the body, does
not
become immobilised in performance — even in repeat performances the
body
cannot fulfil its own sameness from the performance or moment before. The
capacity to re-present predictable signification and subjectivity is challenged.
The
body differs from itself in time as bodies differ from each other in space.
Pluto addresses the stereotypes of queer performance in Australia, ranging
from predictable drag shows to visceral remodifications of the body to illustrate
the plasticity of flesh and any necessary relationship it has with social
subjectivities. Drag performance is problematic in its insistent oscillation
between
a single, albeit troubling binary: masculinity and femininity. Australian poststructural
performance theorist Rachel Fensham points out ‘the performativity
of
gender reiterates even when it parodies the binary, a dramaturgy or choreography
of becoming departs from the inscriptive dualism of bodies as [at least] two
kinds
of subjects’.16 Becoming refers to the continual transformation of
meaning and the
body (both audience’s and performer’s) by replacing pre-conceived
referents
(such as male and female) with unpredictable, continually altering and not
necessarily comprehensible bodily conditions, which affect the audience.
Pluto’s abrasive performance with Lotus Love, Go to Hell (1998) deconstructs
predictable versions of queerness made palatable and consumable by Priscilla
Queen of the Desert (Stephen Elliot, 1994) and cabaret drag performance. In
this
act, Pluto’s face is painted in large black and white stripes, which
camouflage his
costume. While his penis is clearly visible beneath transparent black chiffon,
the
stratification of his body, and hence the function of the penis, is confused
by the
many stripes and lines on his body. The show is speckled with drag-stereotype
miming to songs and flamboyant dancing, both of which are performed so
deliberately badly that eventually the audience comes to understand that mimetic
and binarily coded men-being-women may be interesting but are ultimately
redundant in their repetition.
Pluto’s acerbic interspersions of complex theoretical arguments
about queer
representation and politics in Australia jolt the audience out of the comfort
zone
they expect from drag — campness with little or no political interrogation
of the
real oppression queerness experiences in Australian culture. Because his face
is
essentially camouflaged, the meaning of the words emanating from this body
cannot be oriented to subject or intention, represented ordinarily through
our
understanding of the face. Language, subjective intention and subjectivisation
ordinarily meet where words emit from the face; here the entire body speaks.
Pluto
launches queerness out of its drag ghetto, where an acceptance of drag queens
masquerades as anti-homophobic politics and masks daily experiential
homosexuality and homophobia in Australian legal, urban and domestic environs.
In a participatory moment of the performance, Pluto demands the audience
repeat after him as he asserts that Australian culture’s propensity
to believe what
a queer face tells them what is ‘right’ to say in reference
to queerness prevents any
genuine interaction with the difference of queerness as a corporeal and real
sexuation. His performance is a becoming-political of the essentially aesthetic
understanding of drag. The badly executed drag of this performance makes no
connections, but the political words and confusing make-up and costume force
the
audience to forge as yet unthought connections between themselves (as multiple
forms of body), real lived queer bodies and the world. Go to Hell is a dramaturgy
that encourages probing because the connections it forces its audience to make
replace a logic of gender reversal prevalent in the dualist traditional drag
performance.
In Miss World, performed for the Love Child Event in 1998, Pluto appears in
a
white boiler suit and mask made of newspaper clippings dealing with Pauline
Hanson, domestic violence and murder. A knife is inserted between his legs
and
he thrusts it into an inflated globe of the earth. Although Deleuze and Guattari
claim that ‘Even masks ensure the head’s belonging to the
body, rather than
making it a face’,17 here the white boiler suit makes a white face
of the entire body.
This is achieved by colonising the flesh with the most basic (and yet unattainable)
signifier of generic and specifically white ‘man’-kind — the
phallus and white
skin.
The mask of whiteness is, however, a misnomer. Like women, who cannot
become men by donning pants, the minoritarian face cannot become majoritarian
by wearing a mask. Once a body has become differentiated through its divergence
from the majoritarian, it is defined through that very divergence. It can add
divergences but it cannot subtract them. Men can dress as ‘women’ because
women are the prime divergent from man, but women cannot become men by
wearing drag because the white man stands as the basic template for ‘humanity’.
Pluto’s obvious metaphor of raping the earth is not about the evils
of any body
type, the ‘white man’, but about certain bodily traits (whiteness,
the phallus)
representing political practices, performable by all bodies but aligned with
a
certain political hegemonic dominance.
Miss World continues with Pluto pulling off mask and jumpsuit to reveal his
naked body painted with land and ocean. Pluto sings ‘Am I not your girl?’ while
sticking items such as war planes, toy soldiers and cars on to his flesh.
Majoritarian facial signification is extended to technology and war practice,
yet
Pluto’s penis, painted with the rest of his body, signifies
nothing. Here the
demarcation between bodily traits and the body’s relationship
to its own
signification is made apparent. We are looking at a naked body, where the penis
means nothing except in relation to the flesh as a functioning performing
substance, but the toy planes and soldiers take on the signification of
‘masculinity’, ‘dominance’, ‘violence’, ‘technology’ and ‘progress’ that
are
ordinarily represented symbolically through the penis as phallus. Pluto confuses
an easy binary of earth versus technology by choosing to reveal his clearly
male
body while being ‘mother’ earth. The majoritarian potential
of his body as a white
male is actively renegotiated.
Should we read Pluto’s white male face, he could be majoritarian,19
but in his
performance he doesn’t become mother earth in the way a drag
queen becomes a
certain stereotype of femininity. He makes his body a body that resists singular
(or
singular binary options of) signification. Majoritarianism refers, in its broadest
sense, not to males but to universalising and singular modes of conception,
comprehension and representation. Pluto’s performances require
a new way of
thinking the body’s various inscribed surfaces. They also
posit the body in action
as the prime substance of representation.
Performance encourages the audience to actively make meaning in or
experience the effects of the body, rather than to see and passively react
to a face
subject to its relation to the majoritarian. A performing body differs not
only from
the majoritarian but also, more importantly, from its own self the moment before.
Pluto’s performance Ich Bin Ein Auslander, performed in 1999,
sees his body shed
Colonial Post
many skins: an iron maiden cage, black plastic wrap, eventually
revealing that his
lips are sewn together and a swastika is sewn into his chest, both with eighteengauge
needles and thick black thread. The interiority of his face is produced
through the inflection of the thread from inside to outside, and the blood following
the removal of the thread. If ‘paintings, tattoos or marks on the skin
embrace the
multi-dimensionality of bodies’18 as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, then
the
twisting of body interior and exterior through temporary piercing, especially
of the
enunciative mouth, suggests a body speaking without use of either words or facial
signification.
As evident in the picture, Pluto’s is essentially a white male face, but
the
performance creates a becoming-otherwise of both performer and viewer,
producing a face divergent from its majoritarianism and from its own self — ‘the
human face’ as signifier of a subject cannot be pierced and sewn shut if
it is to
enunciate its subjectivity through its facial signifiers. |
|
In essence, Pluto is a female
face or black face politically, if not visually, in this instant because the
thread
through his mouth performs the same function of signification as does female
faciality or black faciality, silenced by being minoritarian. Although such
a
metaphoric connection could seem trite, the very visual and visceral piercing
of
actual flesh, of real lips is an extreme act that forces engagement.
Because Pluto’s
actual physical body is threatened, the very fleshliness of his face is the
focus; real
and tender lips replace the pure-surface signifying face. This performance
is
‘ representative of silenced speech but, further, it is a performance using real
lips
pierced with real needles causing real pain and carrying with it the threat
of
infection. The facial machine is representation only through its sacrifice
of real
bodies. Actual flesh in Ich Bin ein Auslander is not opposed to or privileged
over
representation of ideas, but the interrelationship of ideas in both the conception
and the political comprehension with bodies is forged.
Conclusion ::
Becoming-political or aspiring toward a politics of difference
must eventually
return to the inextricability of bodies from socially constitutive
discursive
practices. Performing bodies contrast radically against the frozen
and framed face
of the Face of Australia in their failure to produce subjective
meaning in their
audience — we do not ask ‘Who is Pluto?’ but ‘What
is this body doing now?’;
not ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘How do I feel?’ The
faces of Australia are static,
but, as Elizabeth Grosz affirms:
Part of [bodies’] own ‘nature’ is an organic or ontological ‘incompleteness’ or
lack
of finality, an amenability to social completion, social ordering
and organisation …
bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively.
They act and
react. They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable.20
Where we see the stamp series as representing both complete subjects
and a
substantial ‘picture’ of Australian culture in general,
performing bodies such as
Pluto’s exhibit an instability in any body’s capacity
to signify (gender, race,
concept, social comprehension) infinitely. The body’s signified
surfaces are
indivisible from political and social action because, like bodies,
cultural
classification and designation of bodies are interactive and
productive.
Notes to pp 126–139
22 Georgina Whitehead, Civilising the City, City of Melbourne Press, Melbourne,
1997, p 18.
23 HREOC, op. cit., p 12.
24 The website for this project still exists at: http://users.tce.rmit.edu.au/sgmemorials/
25 Melbourne Festival Events Programme, October 11 – November
3 2001, p 50. The project was
collaboration with VIVAIDS, the St Kilda Needle Exchange, RHEDS (formerly the
St Kilda
Prostitutes Collective) and I. See website: http://gallery.tce.rmit.edu.au/131/anti-memorial/
26 As a resident of St Kilda, my intimate knowledge of these territories was
pivotal in the
memorial’s placements. A key aim of the project was to intercede
in the everyday lives of the
diverse population that occupies public space in St Kilda.
27 This project is ongoing collaboration with numerous community groups; my
involvement has
been primarily as the principal co-ordinator and the designer of the gardens.
See website:
http://roadasshrine.tce.rmit.edu.au/
28 Christina Leimer, ‘Spontaneity in remembrance and ritual practice’,
Kerb: The Journal of
Landscape Architecture, vol 9, 1998.
29 Leimer, op. cit., 1998, p 21.
30 Juan Barrera, ‘The dying art of Mexican cemetery practice’,
Terra Firma, vol 17, no 2, 1991, p 280.
31 The Vic Roads Website: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/ details the history
of these memorial
markers and their intention.
32 Parliament of Victoria, ‘Inquiry into Crashes Involving Roadside Objects’,
3 June 2003, p 542.
33 ibid., p 671.
34 Leimer, op. cit., 1998, p 23.
35 Young, At Memory’s Edge, op. cit., pp 120.
The Probe-Head and the Faces of Australia: From Australia Post to Pluto
Patricia MacCormack
Thank you to Amanda James for permission to reproduce her photographs
of Pluto’s
performances.
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, trans
Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, p 188.
2 Deleuze and Guattari, p 291.
3 Deleuze and Guattari, p 168.
4 Australia Post website.
5 Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman, Theory Out of Bounds Volume 8, University
of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1997, pp 3-4.
6 For pointing this out to me I am grateful to Zoë Sofoulis in her response
to my paper ‘Facial
Futures: Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray and (Christopher Walken’s) Becoming
Probe-head’, Casting
New Shadows: New Talents in Feminism Conference, Macquarie University, Sydney,
Australia.
January 2001.
7 Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, University
of California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999, p 14.
8 http://www.austpost.com.au/faces/sfa.htm , author not given.
9 Deleuze and Guattari, p 178.
10 The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in custody (RCIADIC), conducted
from 1987-
1991 found 106 deaths occurred between 1980-9, of which 11 were women. During
the period
of study it was found Indigenous Australians were 29 times more likely to be
arrested and
detained than non-Indigenous Australian persons. At the time of the inquiry
Indigenous
Australians comprised 1.5 per cent of the population yet 50 per cent of the
total number of
females imprisoned in 1988 were Indigenous Australians. Sources: Peter Farrer,
Legal Outcomes,
Jacaranda Press, Milton Queensland, 1999 and http://www.omen.net.au/~dicwc/windex.html
11 Deleuze and Guattari, p 178.
12 ibid., p 171.
13 ibid., p 177.
14 Zoë Sofoulis, ‘Response to Patricia MacCormack “Facial
Futures”’, unpublished paper, p 5.
15 Brian Massumi, ‘Notes on the Translation’, in Deleuze
and Guattari, op. cit., p xvi.
16 Rachel Fensham, ‘Beyond Corporeal Feminism: Thinking Theatre
and Dance at the End of the
Twentieth Century’, paper given in the Centre for Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies,
Monash University, Melbourne, July 25 2001.
Notes to pp 139–144
17 Deleuze and Guattari, p 176.
18 ibid.
19 Although Pluto’s piercings may prevent this, and there
are, of course, certain phantasies of
reading sexuality in the face that may qualify my suggestion.
20 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Sydney, Allen
and Unwin,
1994, p ix.
225
|
