Y. Sone Sensory otherness in Laurie Anderson’s work
Sensory otherness in Laurie Anderson’s work
By Yuji Sone
‘Laurie Anderson has always been a little out there. Maybe that’s why she was tapped as NASA’s first artist in residence.’ (Braiker 2004)
‘I [Anderson] try to pick things that would make people say, “I was just thinking that a couple of days ago; I didn't say it exactly like that but I had that idea.”’ (Howell 1992: 75)
Laurie Anderson has been known for over the past 20 years for her pioneering performance works and installations in which she has seamlessly deployed media technology. Anderson’s involvement with NASA as its first artist-in-residence in 2003-04 seems, indeed, a natural progression. (1) It is, however, worth taking Braiker’s quip in Newsweek seriously: what is it about Anderson’s work that might seem, metaphorically speaking, ‘out there’, or put us ‘out there’? Henry Sayre, for example, discusses of Anderson’s work in terms of a notion of ‘outside’: ‘a sense that they [spectators] are in some measure outside – or wanderers within – the very place they live’ (1989: 147, original emphasis). Sayre points out that the force of Anderson’s work arisen from this dislocation; the work functions through its ‘chance collisions with whatever occurs at its margins’ (1989: 147). Similarly, Silvija Jestrovic discusses place in Anderson’s work with regard to Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ which is understood as real spaces that are fundamentally outside, ‘“counter-sites” to the normative conventional spaces’ (2004: 26). Jestrovic argues that Anderson’s performances fuse and intersect otherwise incompatible spaces, generating a ‘network of “counter-sites” that include street, theatrical sites, virtual places, prisons, and cyber spaces’ (2004: 26). I will explore, in this essay, the margins to which Sayre and Jestrovic refer in relation to the limits of our neuro-biological perception. It is the particular manner in which Anderson manipulates sense perception through technological mediation, engendering spheres of heterogeneity through sensory gaps, I argue, that creates what the audience experiences as a sense of ‘otherness’ within.
This essay analyses the way in which Anderson’s work mobilises perceptual matrices to induce this sense of otherness in the audience, which cannot be elucidated merely by a psychological account. Matthew Causey, for example, discusses new media performance works through a psychoanalytic reading by referring to Freud and Lacan (2003 [1999]: 381-394). He argues that the moment when a performer faces his or her mediated other through the technology of reproduction is uncanny and can be read as ‘making material of split subjectivity’ (Causey 2003 [1999]: 383). The self as other in the space of technology presents an uncanny Double, characteristic of the psychological reading. While Anderson’s recent performance works have been deliberately low-tech, presenting more as story-telling than as a large-scale multi-media gig, the way in which Anderson constructs stories for her solo performance is similar in essence to her other media-based, technological performance and installation works. (2) The audience feels a sense of ‘unfamiliar and yet familiar’ or of ‘distant and yet close’ when experiencing Anderson’s work. This uncanny spectatorial effect is attributable to Anderson’s ability to access a feeling of otherness, a resonant discomfort.
The work of Anderson therefore provides an opportunity, in the age of electronic technologies, for an alternative discussion of otherness in performance, where ‘the other’ usually refers to the feminine other or the cultural other, as for some feminist and NESB (Non English Speaking Background) artists in the 1990s. Otherness in those politically motivated performance works relies on a hierarchical structure that arises from binary oppositions, such as between male and female or between West and non-West, and their representational outcomes. In those schematic binaries, the Other becomes the visible, recognisable and identifiable other. The Other is only seen through a perspective of ‘the same’ – the male or the West. (3) Although Anderson does not overtly take up the issue of ‘the other’ as such, otherness in Anderson’s work, on the other hand, remains unidentifiable, more elusive, and not easily associated with the binaristic ‘Other.’ This unrecognisable Other is therefore irreducible to the selfhood of her audience.
Heterogeneity and ‘inside otherness’
Before analysing Anderson’s work, I will briefly discuss the notions of heterogeneity and ‘inside otherness’ with regard to sensory gaps. The heterogeneous exists in the implosion and rupture of ‘reading.’ This rupture arises not because of double meanings, but due to an invisible clash of two incompatible readings. Craig Owens, for example, who analyses Anderson’s work in terms of irreconcilable readings of signs, cites Yeats’s well-known line, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ (1980: 63). We cannot simply say that this sentence has double meanings, which exist side by side; nor, can we say one reading is more important than the other. There can be no dance without a dancer. This is similar to the famous image of the ‘Rubin vase’ that consists simultaneously of two faces and one vase. One cannot see the two faces and the vase at the same time, but neither image can exist without the other. I will examine how Anderson's performance opens up such spaces – the heterogeneous sensory space, and the heterogeneous identities of ‘I’ and ‘you’ and of ‘male’ and ‘female.’
It is widely accepted that, neuro-biologically, our perceptions are limited. Our organs for the five senses receive external stimuli and send nerve impulses to our brain, but it is our brain that interprets these signals. (4) Sensory information about an environment in which we live does not equate with the environment itself. Our brain selectively registers incoming sensory stimuli if it can recognise them: that is, if it ‘makes’ the signals recognisable. All other signals are deemed unnecessary and are silenced, ignored or forgotten. The brain cannot and does not process all information from all sensory receptors.
For the self to be total, however, it needs to hide the sphere of the unintelligible in the perceptional system. Any incoherence in perception that induces a feeling of uncertainty is treated as abnormal. Our perception is controlled and biased in order for us to construct a subjective totality from scattered sensory information. If, then, this totality is formulated through sensory understandings, it is a type of perceptual creation. Because of the gaps in our perception, this totality of being also has some holes in it. A neuro-biological self contains ambiguities. Our cognitive system, in mainstream neuro-biological terms, has space for uncertainties. In this way, cracks start to appear in the monolithic being. In the cracks, that which is unknown to the self continues to persist, while being unintelligible. A sense of ‘inside otherness’ exists at the sensible and intelligible limit of our sensorium.
Recent studies of perception reveal a more complicated situation than that explained by traditional neuro-biological readings of it. Susan Buck-Morss uses the term ‘synaesthesia’ to identify ‘the mimetic synchrony between outer stimulus (perception) and inner stimulus (bodily sensation, including sense-memories)’ as the most important factor of ‘aesthetic cognition’ (1997 [1992]: 389 n53). Synaesthesia is a complex term, but is often used to describe a sensation in one part of the body produced by a stimulus applied to another part. It can also connote the use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds. Buck-Morss, on the other hand, in deploying the term, directs our attention to the manner in which technological intervention in perception can connect with internal images of memory and anticipation, not only other contemporaneous sensory experiences, as in a strictly neuro-biological understanding of the synaesthetic system.
Our cognitive system through perception has been complicated by technological intervention. Our senses have been extended by a technologically virtual world as in McLuhan's notion of media. Today, digital communication technology has greatly expanded the power of the technological ‘eye’ and ‘ear’: a new space of vision and audition has emerged. Cameras as a technological eye, for instance, have given us images of things that were not perceivable otherwise. It can capture the moment of the body being torn to pieces by an explosion. The artificial eye of a photograph can function outside of human sensitivity. That is, photography can perform outside a synaesthetic relationship between our bodily and cognitive experiences.
Our living environment consists of technologically manipulated sensory signals. Our five senses, in the media age, do not always receive signals that come from the same place and time of dispatch. Watching world news on television, for example, is a spatio-temporal collage. One's vision is extended to the other side of the world through telecommunication while one's body remains at home. These spatial and temporal gaps operate outside the ordinary system of our perception. Yet, we maintain a sense of coherence when we face them. The need for coherence is why we unconsciously switch between seeing a television set as an object and as a window on the world. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to see a television set or a telephone as a device when one is immersed in the television images or in a conversation with someone on a telephone. We oscillate between different modes of perception when we relate to media devices.
It is clear that Anderson is very aware of this mediated technological mosaic. (5) Jacqueline Burckhardt describes Anderson’s work in terms of multiplicity:
Treating everyday life as a playing field of experience and inspiration, she uses her finely honed ability to restructure perception and channel it into multiple events, involving words, sounds, and images. There is no single-minded vantage point that forms her investigations and leads to linear creation; nor has her work settled into conveniently defined phases and periods. (1997: 153)
According to Burckhardt, Anderson's performances and installations create a ‘dreamlike suspension’ in the field of multiple events (1997: 156). I would like to discuss how, in the moment of suspension, the sphere of the heterogeneous unfolds, evoking the experience of an ‘inside otherness’ in the audience. Anderson claims that ‘“communication” is nothing to do with actual communication and much more to do with alienation [...]’ (Smith and Smith 1995: 37). A non-psychological understanding of Anderson’s remark allows us to see how this ‘alienation’ can be constructed as a result of the fragmentation of perceptional modes. I will discuss these points in detail below.
Synaesthesia and Heterogeneous Sensory Space
The heterogeneous sensory field of multiple events is created both through Anderson’s sensuous use of technological mediation and through her manipulation of signs, which confuse the ordinary system of perception and synaesthesia with a technological intervention. Anderson treats technological mediation as an essential and integrated part of her performance work and, therefore, it is not merely a source of performative enhancement or a decorative device. In Anderson's case, mediated forms and modes are used to rearrange our sensory systems.
Anderson’s use of technology separates our senses and reunites them in a different order. By taking advantage of the complex relationship between perception and communication, Anderson exploits the disjunction between representation and presence. In her 1986 performance film, Home of the Brave, Anderson plays a tape bow violin. (6) A strip of recording tape on which the voice of William Burroughs is recorded is mounted on a violin bow, and when Anderson runs it across the violin bridge with a magnetic playback head, it plays Burroughs's voice. Anderson incorporates the recorded voice of Burroughs in a way that confuses the anticipated relationship between what we see and what we hear. We see a performer playing a violin on a stage, but the sound we hear is different from expectations on the basis of what we see. The physical presence of Anderson playing a violin is confounded by the repetitive electronic voice of Burroughs. Throughout the production, Burroughs's existence is suspended between disembodied voice and silent body, the recorded and the live. He is deprived of full presence. In one scene, he can be heard but not seen as described as above. In another, he can be seen on the stage but his voice cannot be heard. Anderson technologically interpolates these fragments of Burroughs into her performance. Yet the performance functions as a seamless and integrated, though perhaps unnatural, whole between vision and audition through technological manipulation, and also between Burroughs and Anderson.
As discussed, we ‘make up’ meaning, or elicit necessary information out of scattered signals. A biological being needs to detect meaningful signals from its visual and sound environment, or for some, from their odoriferous or tactile environment. We do our best to find some meaning, any meaning, in the world around us. In order to perceive anything it is necessary to interpret these signals. We can guess the entire picture of a jigsaw puzzle before it is finished. If we have a conversation in a noisy place, we do not have to hear every word to make sense of it. We fill in the gaps. Phone sex, for example, exploits these gaps. Allucquère Rosanne Stone asserts that in commercial phone sex ‘client and provider mobilize erotic tension by taking advantage of lack’ (1995: 95). The customer fills in the missing sensory information of vision, smell and taste, through verbal tokens offered by the provider. A kind of fantastic, synaesthetic whole is momentarily evoked for specific, established purposes.
Cross-sensory effects in Anderson's work are complex. In Home of the Brave, discussed above, Burroughs's recorded voice was juxtaposed with the performer playing a violin. If there were merely a recorded voice, the audience could compensate for the lack of Burroughs's body by imagining his presence. But, because Anderson was ‘playing’ Burroughs's voice, the audience could not use known procedures for filling sensory and cognitive gaps. Instead, the performance generated a kind of dislocation, or an implosion between vision and audition while rendering a mediated reality sensuous – that is to say, literally ‘of the senses.’
What Anderson does in performance work is to slip technology into a gap between the digital and analogue nature of our communication, making us experience a mixture of the two modes of communication via media devices. (7) Digital elements, such as words or images in her work, are often transformed through a sensuous use of media technology so that the non-analogue elements induce a particular sensitivity to the texture of performance. Paradoxically, the disembodied informs the ‘liveness’ of the embodied: the technological mediation itself begins to take on life. The performance itself became a kind of a live organism. Anderson describes her work with the term ‘the electric body’ (1994: 174-181). Philip Auslander discusses the performative moment as itself a ‘cyborg’, a fusion of human and machine (1992: 30-42). The ‘cyborg-ness’ of Anderson's performance is more subtle and cunning than the popular-culture concept of the cyborg, as in the film The Terminator. She doesn't simply juxtapose the body and technology, or use technology as a substitution of the body, but plays with our capacity to ‘make up’ meaning in sensory gaps by mimicking a kind of experiential embodiment. Amelia Jones aptly describes Anderson’s work as creating a ‘technophenomenological body’ (1998: 17).
Another way in which Anderson creates a synaesthetic and heterogeneous sensory field of multiple events is on the basis of her understanding of the problematic of ‘signs.’ On one level Anderson's work is, as Jen Budney describes, ‘the art of the unseen (thoughts, dreams, memories, and hallucinations) and the doubly-seen (ambiguous signs, misread cues, and multiple interpretations)’ (1997: 160). Owens pointed out that her performances deal with the ‘illegibility’ or ‘unreadability’ of signs. For example, in Americans on the Move, Anderson made a remark about the emblazoned images on Apollo 10 spacecraft – ‘a nude man and woman, the former's right arm raised at the elbow, palm proffered’ (Owens 1980: 60). Her comment was, ‘[i]n our country [United States], good-bye looks just like hello’ (Owens 1980: 60). Owens argues that the artist is not concerned with
ambiguity, with multiple meanings engendered by a single sign; rather, two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to chose between them. (1980: 61, original emphasis) (8)
Anderson, as a media artist, addresses ‘illegibility’ on various levels of vision, audition, texts and the performance body although they are very much mixed in the actual work. To understand this, one could think of calligraphy. Calligraphy can make us reconsider the gap between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’ because one’s attention in a work of calligraphy moves between both modes. The heterogeneity inherent in calligraphy illustrates sensory and cognitive gaps that would otherwise be ignored. Anderson works in this area of heterogeneity between reading, seeing, and listening, evoking complex responses but at the same time creating an additional reading of ‘complexity.’ She does this by confusing the intertwined relationships between sign, meaning, agent of action, and referent by taking out one of the four elements, or by changing the order between the four in the ordinary sign system, or by mixing them with a different element from another sign.For example, in Handphone Table in 1977, she presented an installation with a table, and described the set-up as follows: