Identity Plays: Life as Art

David Massey

A paper presented at the

Arts Intersections SymposiumArts, disability, happiness, and well-being

Griffith University Logan Campus

17-18 July 2008

Identity Plays: Life as Art

Contents

Life Art

Life as art

Play Identity

Identity plays

Players

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances.

Jacques

in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy

As You Like It

Comings and goings

Empty-handed I entered the world Barefoot I leave it. My coming, my going -- Two simple happenings That got entangled.

Kozan Ichikyo, died 1360, aged 77 Composed on the morning of his death

Source - http://www.salon.com/weekly/zen960805.html

Entanglements

Attachments, separations, losses Joys and woes

Man (sic) was made for Joy & Woe; And when this we rightly know Thro' the World we safely go.

William Blake: Auguries of Innocence

Life

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, (Macbeth, Act V, scene v, 23-27)

A dream?

BOAT, beneath a sunny sky Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July–

Ever drifting down the stream-- Lingering in the golden gleam-- Life, what is it but a dream?

Lewis Carroll

Chuang Tzu

Chinese philosopher 399 - 295 B.C.

Tzu or butterfly? Man who dreamed he

was a butterfly - or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man?

Butterfly Dreaming

Raina Donovan

Indigenous Painter

Bowraville, NSW

Image is the copyright of the artist who generously granted permission for it to be used in this presentation.

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Arts Mid North Coast Inc

Art Artists and Artworks

Art works

Previous slide

Lawrence Daws: The Far Shore Margaret Olley: Eucharist Lillies

Source: Art for Humanity; Australian Red Cross http://www.redcross.org.au/howyoucanhelp_ArtforHumanity.htm

Psychiatry unit residents Source Libby Woodhams

Lawrence Daws

Daws [in The Far Shore] brings to his work a sense of foreboding mixed with an almost dreamlike tranquility. Always present however, no matter where he locates the physical geography of his art, is another landscape - the inner landscape of the unconscious mind.

Dr Candice Bruce, 2006

http://www.robingibson.net/public_html/DAWS/Daws06.html

Other players

Audiences Curators Sponsors Critics

Consumers Presenters Performers Poiesis

Poiesis

The process of making art Poiesis is a creative process which

transforms the world, from which the term poetry derives.

All artists have the potential to make works of art which transform the world and “turn the soul around”.

Poets; Painters; Composers; Writers

Life as art

Poiesis, in relation to human life, is “a way of making our lives into life-stories.”

Furthermore, “each life-story cries out to be ‘imitated’, that is, transformed into the story of a life.”

Richard Kearney, 2002: 131

Living/telling

A life as lived is inseparable from a life as told (Jerome Bruner, 1987: 31).

Offering a narrative account of one’s life, therefore, constitutes, not merely describes, who we are. It is an identity constitutive activity which, I posit, is usefully understood as an artistic endeavour.

A work of art?

But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? (Michel Foucault, 1984: 350)

Could become a work of art or is a work of art?

If we become

If "we become the autobiographical narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives” (Bruner, 1987: 15), then surely this warrants our careful attention, for our lives may well depend on it.

Are we not all Scheherazades? (Massey, 2005)

But

What to tell? Content: Selections; omissions

How to tell? Medium; form; tone; style;

Who to tell? Will they listen? Will they be receptive?

When to tell? Where to tell?

Selections; omissions

What would you select to tell about your life? Why?

What would you omit to tell? Why?

Not just any

Not just any autobiography will do (Bruner, 1987: 14).

Since “we are virtually from the start expressions of the culture that nurtures us” (Bruner, 2002: 87)

Life stories must mesh, within a community of life stories.

Bruner, 1987: 21.

Meshing and sharing

Tellers and listeners must share some “deep structure” about the nature of a “life,” for if the rules of life-telling are altogether arbitrary, tellers and listeners will surely be alienated by a failure to grasp what the other is saying or what he (sic) thinks the other is hearing.

Jerome Bruner, 1987: 21

Well-formed lives

The well-formed life [life/story] is exceedingly rare.

But what is a well-formed life, a “well-wrought self-narrative”?

Keeping the options open so that one does not become fixated on one story and thus form a fixed identity.

See Bruner, 1997: 155-156

Life virtues

The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing - style, connectedness, grace, elegance.

[Foucault] took both his picture of the world and the pieces of his life and put them together into a new outlook, a new way of writing, a new self.

Alexander Nehamas, 1998

Borrowed lives

Most people actually lead borrowed lives, stories told by other people. They occasionally make small differences here or there to the stories they are told, but a small difference leaves you essentially the same as the rest of the world. It is in that sense that they live lives of quiet desperation - or, at least, quiet lives.

Nehamas, 1998

Play

Playful; frolicsome; enjoyment

Dramatic Performance

Manoeuvre: tactic; strategy

Imagination

The reality of imagination

We do not apprehend things only through actual experience. We can also, given the right conditions, grasp it through the imagination, and in such a direct and physical way that it becomes utterly real.

As writers [artists?] we have the duty – and we ought to have the capacity – to work this imaginative trick or miracle.

David Malouf, 1987: 22

Nations as imagined Communities

One can only understand nations imaginatively.

Identity

Who we are

But who are we?

We are storied beings the stories told - by ourselves and others - about our lives constitute who we are

Always already

Human life is always already an implicit story (Kearney, 2002: 129). Beginnings (entrances), middles (entanglements)

and ends (exits)

Each life-story cries out to be ‘imitated’, that is, transformed into the story of a life (Kearney, 2002: 131).

Questing

Life in quest of narrative. Paul Ricoeur, 1991

Autobiographical accounts are “an endless prelude.” Louis Renza, 1980

Identity play

If one accepts life as a play (art) and, secondly, that we are all players (life artists), how do we play or how might we play so that we are not ‘merely players’, or not poor players who ‘strut and fret’, but good players who live ‘refined’ lives?

Identity plays

Poietic

Political

Ethical

Ecological

Motility

Poietic plays

Telos: Making identities into a particular configuration: a distinctive form or shape. Makers shape things into being, granting

them their intrinsic identity. Alberto Manguel, 2007: 13

Synthesizing the heterogenous. Paul Ricoeur, 1991: 21

Life Forms

My Many Selves. The Quest for a Plausible Harmony. Wayne Booth

Flawed perfection Maria Callas: her life

and music

Political plays

Telos: preserving and enhancing the integrity of one’s identity.

Negotiating identities

Claiming and reclaiming identities

Resisting identities

Narrative Artifice

Narratives of hope and narratives of resistance capture the inevitable conflict that women feel when they become subjects of fertility medicine.

On the one hand, they must remain hopeful; on the other, they must not surrender themselves completely.

Resistance narratives help us see how women can reconcile the experience of a strong desire to have children with the desire to remain authentic and whole.

Aline Kalbian, 2005

This is my home!

Jessie Lennon’s narrative, I’m the One That Know This Country!, … “speaks back to power from the other side.”

It “testifies to displacements of her people through a process of colonisation and the British nuclear tests at Maralinga.”

Kay Schaffer, 2004: 15-16

Ethical plays

Telos: Aiming for the good, with and for others, in just institutions. Paul Ricoeur, 1992

Groping for some goodness, alone and with others, in calamitous situations. David Massey, 2000

Recuperating

While emphasizing the need to recuperate the victim’s voice from the silence of oblivion, the narrator [Ida Fink, Holocaust survivor] … often falter[s] as she realizes that words circumvent the events but never palpate the horror.

Dorota Glowacka, 2002: 107

Storyteller as witness

[Ida Fink, in her short stories, which are reconstructions of ‘true’ events] discovers that the task of the storyteller as witness is to allow the time of the Other to creep into the interstices of the present and inflect by its difference the complacency of memory.

Dorota Glowacka, 2002: 107

Ecological plays

Telos: connecting with others and finding one’s place in the world.

Connecting with those not only similar to, but also different from, ourselves

Place and home By art we come to feel at home in the

world. Brian Etter (2006: 16)

Motility plays

Telos: to stay alive and be lively: vitality, fluency, movement.

This continuous movement, life’s incessant sliding and flowing. James Olney, 1998: 317

For all its grave stillness, there is nothing more dynamic than a corpse. Robert Harrison, 1994: 93.

Going on

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 382.

You are the music while the music lasts. T.S. Eliot

Recapitulation

Poietic Making Political Positioning Ethical Orienting Ecological Connecting Motility Rhythming

Life art

Life art is fine art

It is fine in the sense that the ‘end’ it seeks is a good end: a refined life of truth, beauty and goodness.

Parrhesia: This is what I believe and I will express it even though I expose myself to possible ridicule, danger or death in doing so. The truths which are revealed are the moral

qualities of the speakers (life-artists).

A refined life

To live well is to live a ‘refined life’ as an artist, making and remaking fitting identities.

A refined life, in other words, is a life which is artfully finessed: finessed by continually executing poietic, political, ethical, ecological and motility identity plays.

Refinement

Poietically articulate: unarticulate or inarticulate

Politically adept

Ethically discerning

Ecologically attuned

Motility fluent Lifely rather than deathly

Sweet momentum

I slide down the green walls into the bay to feel what I started out with, what I lost so quickly and for so long: the sweet momentum, the turning force underfoot, and those brief, rare moments of grace.

Bruce, 50, a character in Tim Winton’s novel Breath.

The refined life

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

The refined life is worth living.

A refined life

Alice Wexler’s (1995) account of her mother with Huntington’s Chorea Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research.

While attending to her mother’s pathology, Wexler does not reduce her to a syndrome – cultural (oppressed woman), psychiatric (depressed housewife), or biomedical (victim of hereditary disease). Rather, she recuperates her and places her at the center of family dynamics.

G. Thomas Couser, 2004: 191

Demystification & restoration

Wexler’s book demystifies her mother’s behaviour, restoring dignity to her mother and meaning to her life.

Endowed with unexpected depth and complexity.

G. Thomas Couser, 2004: 191

Making art work

Hearing the moral impulse in others’ stories enables us to become part of their struggle to reenchant a disenchanted world (Frank, 2002: 18).

Engaging deeply and lovingly with others’ lifeartworks, I suggest, attentive to the moral impulse in their lifeart, may enable us to contribute to the enchantment of the world, the enrichment of lives and, contra Macbeth,

to see life as signifying something. ■

References

Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso.

Beckett, Samuel (1979) The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Picador.

Blake, W. (1988) Auguries of innocence. In David V. Erdman (Ed.) The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, with a commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, Newly Revised Edition.

Bruner, J. (1987) Life as narrative. Social Research, 54 (1), 11-32. Bruner, J. (1997) A Narrative Model of Self-Construction. In J. Gay & R. Thompson (Eds)

The Self Across Psychology. Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self-Concept. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.

Booth, Wayne C. (2006) My Many Selves. The Quest for a Plausible Harmony. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.

Bruner, J. (2002) Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

References continued

Carrier, D. (1998) Alexander Nehamas. Interview. Bomb Magazine, 65, 36-41.

Carroll, Lewis. (1903) Life is but a Dream. The Hunting of the Snark and Other Poems and Verses. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Couser, G.T. (2004) Genome and Genre. DNA and Life Writing. In Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing. New York: Cornell University Press.

Etter, B. (2006) Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics. New York: SUNY Press.

Frank, A.W. (2002) Why study people’s stories? The dialogical ethics of narrative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1 (1), Winter, 1-20.

Glowacka, D. (2002) Chapter 6. Disappearing Traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Fink’s

Literary Testimony, and Holocaust Art. In D. Glowacka and S. Boos (Eds) Between Ethics and Aesthetics. Crossing the Boundaries. New York: State University of New York Press.

Harrison, R. P. (1994) The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kalbian, Aline H. (2005) Narrative Artifice and Women’s Agency, Bioethics, 19 (2), 93-

111.

References continued

Kearney, R. (2002) On Stories. London and New York: Routledge.

Malouf, D. (1987) Essay. In Dorothy Green and David Headon (Eds) Imagining the Real. Australian Writing in the Nuclear Age. Sydney: ABC Enterprises.

Manguel, A. (2007) The City of Words. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Massey, D. (2000) Ethics as Ordeal. QAI Newsletter, December, 21-35.

Massey, D. (2005) Identity Pragmatics. A paper originally presented at the colloquium Applied Ethics: Challenges and Explorations. Carseldine campus, Queensland University of Technology, 1-2 June, 2001.

Nehamas, A. (1998) 6. A Fate for Socrates’ Reason: Foucault on the Care of the Self. The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Olney, J. (1998) Memory and Narrative. The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Renza, L. (1980) The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography. In James Olney (ed.) Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References continued

Ricoeur, P. (1991) Chapter 2. Life in Quest of Narrative. In David Wood (Ed.) On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. London and New York: Routledge.

Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schaffer, K. (2004) Narrative Lives and Human Rights: Stolen Generation Narratives and

the Ethics of Recognition. Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 3, 5-26.

White, P. (1983) Flaws in the Glass. London: Penguin.

Winton, T. (2008) Breath. Hamish Hamilton.