ICONOGRAPHY AND INTERTEXTUALITY: THE DISCREET CHARM OF MEANING
Dr Sophia Preston SDHS conference 1998
At a recent symposium on dance and theatre history[1] I outlined a strategy employed in my analysis of dance-music relationships, in which I draw meanings (in terms of references and associations) from one dance to another, constructing an ‘iconography’ of motifs or devices in a choreographer’s work.[2] In response a post-structuralist theatre historian sternly warned me to “’Beware meaning’ for, as Baudrillard says, ‘it is the death certificate of art.’”[3] I nodded my head in sage agreement, only realising five minutes later that I did not agree with this contention at all. Not only does it jeopardise a large part of my methodology but it also contradicts my teaching experience in which I repeatedly find that it is the very process of meaning-making which gives students a way in to a piece that they otherwise find impenetrable.
It seems to me that one of the questions we should be asking, as contemporary dance scholars, is to do with the processes of meaning-making undergone both in a piece and in its reception. I will be asking this question of Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas (1989), but before I do so I feel I must make a case for the validity of such an undertaking. Postmodern and post-structuralist thinking has had such an impact on the academic and critical world
within which Dance Studies has been developing as a discipline that it seems that we should beware the extremes to which post-structuralist reading might, logically, take us rather than beware meaning per se.
Baudrillard has, indeed, called “the revolution... of postmodernity...the immense process of the destruction of meaning” and continued, “whoever lives by meaning, dies by meaning” (1981, p39). He takes things even further when he extends Marshall McLuhan’s famous slogan by saying:
the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message but also the end of the medium. There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term... - that is to say a power mediating between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another - neither in content, nor in form. (Baudrillard 1983 pp102-103)
Baudrillard is, by this point, questioning any construct of an absolute reality; his observations of the proliferation of visual images and signs having led him to question the notion of an external reality to which artworks could refer. As Kellner notes:
Baudrillard claims that in the contemporary world the boundary between representation and reality implodes, and that, as a result, the very experience and ground of `the real’ disappears... Baudrillard is arguing that commodity signs, for instance, refer to and gain their significance in relation to other commodity signs within the code of a `structural law of value,’ rather than to any external referents or ground of value, just as media representations refer primarily to other media representations rather than to any outside world.
(Kellner 1989 p63)
Roland Barthes constructs a similar view of the depthlessness of signs when he contends that
in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, `run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.
(Barthes 1977 p147) [Barthes’ italics]
Thus, my notion of helping students to find their way in to a work is misconceived, not because of any problems they might have with understanding but because there is no ‘inside’ to find. As Barthes puts it,
if up until now we have looked at the text as a species of fruit with a kernel (an apricot, for example) the flesh being the form and the pit being the content, it would be better to see it as an onion, a construction of layers ...whose body contains, finally, no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity of its own envelopes - which envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces.
(Barthes cited in Lodge, 1977 p63)
Selden, Widdowson and Brooker suggest that, for a post-structuralist,
the worst sin a writer can commit is to pretend that language is a natural, transparent medium through which the reader grasps a solid and unified `truth’ or `reality’. The virtuous writer recognizes the artifice of all writing and proceeds to make play with it. Bourgeois ideology, Barthes’bete noire, promotes the sinful view that reading is natural and language transparent; it insists on regarding the signifier as the sober partner of the signified, thus in authoritarian manner repressing all discourse into a meaning.
(Selden, Widdowson, Brooker, 1997 p156)
This identification of a desire for meaning with a bourgeois ideology recurs again and again in structuralist and post-structuralist writing. Eagleton talks of an “old-fashioned modernism... that...obstinately refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning” and is “embarrassingly enmortgaged to the very bourgeois humanism it otherwise seeks to subvert” (1988 p394). Felperin talks of the “bourgeois complacency, circularity, and unself-consciousness” (1986 p80) of ‘mimetic criticism’ and continues:
Under cover of ‘objectivity’ masquerade highly questionable and outmoded notions of ‘evidence’, such as biography, history, laws of genre, psychology. ‘Good taste’ corresponds to the presuppositions of bourgeois morality and manners; ‘clarity’ is the mark of works that observe the habits of the realistic tradition.
(Felperin 1986 p80)
Luis Bunuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) provides a vivid picture of the fate he felt was due to this despised class. Near the end the six bourgeois, bored, corrupt and corrupting characters, who have spent the whole film endlessly (and unsuccessfully) attempting to have a dinner party together, are mown down in a volley of machine gun fire delivered by Parisian radicals who appear to have wandered in from the 1968 riots. Admittedly the image owes more to Surrealism than post-structuralism; at the close of the film the six are seen again wandering down a never-ending road, indomitably strolling forward in pursuit of their meal. As John Baxter notes, “Breton had posited as `the simplest Surrealist gesture’ simply shooting at random into a crowd” (Baxter 1994 p202) and this gesture is also presented at the end of Bunuel’s Phantom of Liberty (1975) begun in the following year. Bunuel’s hatred of the bourgeoisie is, however, matched by structuralists’ and post-structuralists’ suspicion of the ‘closing down’ inherent in what they see as a bourgeois search for meaning. As Steven Connor writes:
Postmodern theories of drama have laid great stress upon [the] contingency of performance...What matters according to this aesthetic of impermanence is not the bourgeois-repressive qualities of memory, inheritance and repeatability, but the liberating qualities of immediacy and uniqueness.
(Connor 1989 p134)
In foregrounding the proliferation of texts produced by an open reading, post-structuralism thus calls into question any notion of stability of a text. Barthes insists that “the Text is a methodological field...[it] only exists in the movement of a discourse...the Text is experienced only in an activity of production” (1977 p157) [Barthes’ italics]. In studying a performance art as fleetingly transient as dance tends to be (with no prescriptive score even to make pretensions to a concrete text), the adoption of such constructs leaves us without a ‘work’ to study at all.
In recent Dance Scholarship some writers have ceased to consider works, concentrating instead on the process, and materials, of performance. Susan Foster, for example, has moved from a clear account of how “we can decipher a dance’s codes and structures” in Reading Dancing (1986 pxvii), through the ‘Bodily Musings’ of Choreographing History (1995) to her performed lecture ‘The ballerina’s phallic pointe’ which forms the first chapter of Corporealities (1996). All three texts are invaluable as considerations of approaches to, and the physical material of, dance, but the shift in emphasis reflects the increased questioning in contemporary critical theory of the very notion of a `work’.
Just as a recent call for papers for an inter-disciplinary music and dance conference in Leeds contained the warning ‘No papers analysing single texts will be considered’[4], so Ellen Goellner and Jacqueline Murphy, in their introduction to Bodies of the Text (1995) write:
We know that readers will find subjects missing from this volume: an essay on the Merce Cunningham-John Cage collaboration, for instance, or one on gothic narrative and Romantic ballet, or on Greek mythology in choreography by Martha Graham and by Mark Morris.
(Goellner and Murphy 1995 px)
While I have no wish to prescribe such essays in a book on dance and literature I do worry that there continues to be a dearth of writings about dances. Dance scholarship is so young a discipline that we do not have a back catalogue of writings about works to compare, learn from or even deride. Not only is the history of dance jeopardised by a reluctance to provide in-depth accounts of works which will otherwise be lost when they cease to be performed, but so also is analysis. To approach dances without any knowledge of previous (or indeed, later) works by the same choreographer, or by others working in a similar style, or of any related artworks to which a piece may be making reference, is to subscribe to a notion of dance pieces as unique, stand-alone works of art that express the choreographer’s inner emotion in a way that will speak via a universal non-verbal body language to any viewer. The development of ethnography has shown that this is simply not the case. To accept this kind of ‘innocent’ (un-informed) reading as the norm is to impoverish the art form.
I found it indicative of the different states of dance scholarship and musicology that when I was researching this paper a single visit to my University library yielded four volumes on the music of Henry Purcell including two entirely on Dido and Aeneas, one a sole-authored history and analysis and one a collection of essays on the work, including a full score. Acocella’s excellent biography of Mark Morris (1993) contains many insights into Morris’s choreography of Dido and Aeneas but other, brief, references to the work, such as those in Burt (1995) and Morris (1996), focus almost entirely on questions of gender and the body.
Considerations of the dancing body are obviously of central importance to the discipline (indeed, I found Gay Morris’s observations on the different gendering of Dido’s and Aeneas’s body postures invaluable) but I contend that considerations of processes of signification in a work, the interplay of structures, references and associated texts, are also crucially important facets of dance analysis. We may have our doubts about entering into the construction of a canon of works but it seems to me that the best way to avoid this is to have as many different readers and readings about as many different works as possible.
Felperin makes it clear that post-structuralist theories, if taken to their logical conclusions, might well end in negation of the possibility of interpretation:
Once criticism...achieves an ironic or ludic recognition of the inadequacy of its own law-making, understands that its legal systems are already obsolete, riddled with loopholes, inapplicable even as they are codified, it turns into deconstruction, which is nothing other than language scepticism in the mode of play, an exacting and rigorous form of play, but play all the same. The only alternative to the ludic attitude, after such knowledge, would be morose silence.
(Felperin 1986 p131)
When Barthes constructed his ground-breaking argument that everything is `always already written’ with the author simply acting as a conduit, a performative story-teller, in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), he suggested that while
a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation... there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader.
(Barthes 1977 p148)
Later, however, he identified that “this ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)” (Barthes 1975 p10).
As Barthes entered into the playful, plural realm of post-structuralism with his reading/ writing of Balzac’s Sarrasine, in S/Z (1970), he did not entirely leave behind his own subjective (if constructed) identity in his choice of codes through which he generated his parallel texts. Robert Scholes has criticised that choice as “too arbitrary, too personal, and too idiosyncratic” (1974 p149) but, logically, there is bound to be an arbitrary and indeed idiosyncratic element in a choice from an infinite range of possibilities. What post-structuralist approaches have taught us - and it is an invaluable lesson - is that the only way we can approach any sort of objectivity is to admit our subjectivity, our stance in relation to the artwork we are analysing. By this I do not mean some kind of confessional: “My name is Sophy and I am a bourgeois liberal humanist”; that will, after all, be abundantly clear from my writing. It is more a case of identifying the reason for the analysis, the questions being asked of it and of the piece. In this case I am looking at Morris’s Dido and Aeneas with particular reference to constructions of meaning within the work.
Sheriff identifies the Saussurean construction of semiotics, which places the signifier and signified in a dyadic relation, as the source of the two extremes of either endless play or morose silence.
Deconstructionists say that the play of trace, differance within the gap [between signifier and signified] defers meaning endlessly. Without the retention of differance, not only between but also within signs, no meaning can arise; because of such retention of differance, the gap is irreducible and the meaning is deferred...Both structuralism and deconstruction lose the ability to talk with any conviction about “the meaning of something” because of the gap inherent in the dyadic sign.
(Sheriff 1989 p47)
Sheriff suggests that a Peircean, triadic, construction of semiotics with a sign or representamen, object and interpretant (the sign developed in the mind of the perceiver) allows for a more coherent approach to meaning. Peirce considers that the sign stands for its object “not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen” (Peirce cited in Sheriff 1989 p56) - [Peirce’s italics]. Sheriff reflects that
Peirce gives us a definition of a sign that adds to the sign/object, signifier/signified relationship the interpretant, a sign in the mind, and he argues that this triadic relation is irreducible and always has meaning. In fact, meaning is the medium, the mediator, the ground by which we experience sign/object relations.
(1989 pp57-58)
Using Peirce’s triadic semiotic model we are able to deal with meaning in dance works in a coherent, albeit contingent way, without aiming for a single, fixed or `right’ meaning. In identifying our stance in relation to a work in terms of the way we are reading it, the interpretative strategy being undertaken, (to use Stanley Fish’s construct) we are providing a ground for the interpretant.
Fish (1980) not only identifies readers following particular strategies as forming `interpretive communities’, but he also suggests that works invite certain strategies to be undertaken. He recognises that his construction of the `optimal reader’ of a work as one who `realizes’ (in both senses of the word) the author’s intention, involves him in a circular argument. He writes:
I describe the experience of a reader who in his strategies is answerable to an author’s intention, and I specify the author’s intention by pointing to the strategies employed by that same reader. But this objection would have force only if it were possible to specify one independently of the other. What is being specified from either perspective are the conditions of utterance, of what could have been understood to have been meant by what was said.
(Fish 1988 p321)
I chose Morris’s Dido and Aeneas as an example work for this paper since (it seems to me) it invites a consideration of just how it engages in meaning-making. My conclusions on meaning within the work are thus both the basis for, and the result of, my reading.
Starting with the first sung text in the dance it is possible to build up a lexicon of movements which are identified with specific words. This is a particularly appropriate strategy for Dido and Aeneas as it rapidly becomes apparent that Morris is matching specific movements to specific words, never missing repetitions, however quickly they pass by. The piece is thus inviting me not only to identify these `matches’ but also to be aware of the overt nature of the choreographic strategy.
The following words occur more than once in the dance and have either iconic or symbolic movements (to use Peirce’s category of signs) attached to them. Where an apparently equivalent verbal term is used in later instances I have included these in the list:
shake; brow; fate; allow; empire/Italian ground/Hesperian shore; pleasures flowing/Elysian bowers; smiles; you; banish; sorrow; care; grief; never/no trouble; fair/Queen/Dido/royal fair; Ah!; Belinda; press'd/heart/breast; torment/oppress'd/distress'd; confess'd; languish; guess'd/know/known/forget/sensible; Trojan guest/Royal guest/Aeneas/hero; Carthage/state/this land; revive; monarchs/Troy; foes; storm; soft; strong/wretches/wretched; woe/bless'd; see; piety/pity; loves/lover; strew; pursue; fire/flame; flight; your/my/his; fall; conquest/fact/resolv'd; triumph; raven; appear; Jove/god-like/gods/the Almighty powers; commands; tonight/here [this night/this place]; drive/haste/away; vaulted cell; Diana/Actaeon/cupid/in chase; hounds; after; mortal wounds; obey/decree; anchors weighed; part; forsook; heaven; bereft; die/death; deceitful streams/ocean/fatal Nile; good;