Dance Macabre

Allen S. Weiss, Associate adjunct professor, Performance studies and cinema studies, New York University

“My first doll: my father's sex. He injured it with his zipper. And he said, ‘Look, I made a doll.’ I remember that there was a bloodstained bandage around his sex, and this was the first doll that struck me.” [1] These words – Michel Nedjar’s, not my own – bespeak a radical iconoclasm, where the regulatory transcendental signifier, the rod of the Law, the Phallus that orders the symbolic system, is reduced to a mere plaything, a doll. Nedjar's dolls come from elsewhere. Another system, not iconic and symbolic, but transformative and iconoclastic, is needed to situate them. This iconoclasm is not only visual, but also sonic. While my study of the demonic manifestations of the glissando – a modernist version of the diabolus in musica – expressed in Varieties of Auditory Mimesis [2] deals with the epistemology of how sound evokes imagery, the following thoughts on dolls will attempt the opposite, to suggest how certain morbid objects evoke a profoundly disquieting music.

In Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship, Clayton Eshleman discusses the implications of the Freudian notion of the primal scene on the poetic imagination. He utilizes the model of a pyramid lying on its side to connect memory with the immemorial, humanity with the unhuman, the body with phantoms: surmounted by the self, the parents are phantasized in the primal act of coitus, interpreted simultaneously as copulation and mutual cannibalism; this is in turn divided into the sets of grandparents, great-grandparents, etcetera. Exploring the depths of this pyramid, he asks: “Who knows what you will find at the back wall – deified ancestors, human beings with animal heads, or roaring nothingness? And streaming out from the base, like giant squid tentacles, are these not the pyramid’s roots connecting it to the kingdoms of the nonhuman other?” [3] What if we were to use this schema to create a doll museum? At the entrance will be found the stereotyped, neurotic, Oedipal family games in which dolls are so often cast; further back are ritual dolls representing ancestral figures, guarantees of social continuity and psychic stability; yet further back will be effigies of white and black magic, fetish dolls, demonic figurines, death images; and finally, in the profoundest recesses, exist certain unmentionable, unrepresentable, uncanny objects, hardly dolls at all, inadequate icons of the black abyss of depression, the horrific dismemberments of schizophrenia, the crushing deifications of psychosis. [4]

It is precisely within this teratological boundary, according to an apotropaic magic, that we must situate Nedjar's dolls: “In the primordial mud of existence, an exhumed doll, a miraculated body soaked with tears.” The logic of monsters is one of particulars, not essences. Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination, formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity, ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy; through lack, excess, or multiplication; through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the conflation of genders and genres. Monsters manifest the plasticity of the imagination and the catastrophes of the flesh. Monsters exist in margins. They are thus avatars of chance, impurity, heterodoxy; abomination, mutation, metamorphosis; prodigy, mystery, marvel. Ultimately, monsters are indicators of epistemic shifts. As such, Nedjar’s dolls are personifications of anguish, memento mori, simultaneously creations in order to remember and remembrances in order to forget. They effectuate a return of the repressed, a precarious overloading of the memory system that permits a mourning without which history itself is an abomination. These anxiety producing objects evoke a counter-sublime, indicating those terrors, inexorable and insidious, that exist within our own bodies.

In describing these dolls, Nedjar, trained as a tailor, explained that in order to be able to make them he had to “unlearn” how to sew. One might consequently suggest that the appropriate audio technique evoked by these dolls would be that of montage, of linguistic disarticulation.

Linguistic analysis of glossolalia reveals that it is the opposite of everyday speech, where the distinction between subject and object is paramount. In glossolalia as in certain forms of aphasia, the differentiation between paradigm (word choice) and syntagm (word order) is abolished, such that the production of discrete linguistic segments is disrupted. Segmentation becomes undecidable and unambiguous signification impossible. Given this equivocation of signification, glossolalic utterances permit no distinction between the subject of the enunciation and object of the statement, thus no real determination of subjectivity. It is precisely for this reason that glossolalia is often deemed a manifestation of divine inspiration. As relations between sound and meaning break down, we enter the realm of pure sound, the manifestation of language in its raw materiality, its pure expressivity, its ultimate excess. Glossolalia is not meaningless: rather, meaning becomes a function of non-linguistic determinants, of libidinal energertics as well as of performative, dramatic, expressive usage. Thus glossolalia approaches the ideal of a private language, a utopian expression. As the origin of discourse is indeterminable within the deictic structure of the phrasing in glossolalia, the unknowable subject may be equally present or absent, human or divine, living or dead. (This is often the case in schizophrenic discourse, as attested to in the many volumes of Antonin Artaud’s Cahiers de Rodez, written during the years of his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.) Christof Migone reminds us, in his forthcoming work Sonic Somatic, that such linguistic forms as stuttering and babble each in its own way establishes the dis-unity of the subject, its dis-integration, its infinite divisibility, through a language which is not addressed to anyone, which has no center, which does not reveal anything. 

Might not such babbling, stuttering, glossolaliating speech be appropriate to the Danse Macabre of Nedjar’s dolls, and their psychopompic function of leading us to the underworld? For despite countless manifestations over the centuries since its creation in the Middle Ages, until recently the Danse Macabre has only existed in two major forms: that of the individual confronting death, as in Hans Holbein’s Totentanz woodcut series; and that of the group, usually numbered as seven, being led off by Death in a final dance, most famously depicted in the fresco of the baptistry of the cathedral in Pisa, and at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Since each new technology transforms not only the forms of perception but also the lineaments of the unconscious, one might well attempt to imagine new variants of the Danse Macabre for our electronically transfigured century. The invention of sound recording technologies inaugurated the possibilities of both hearing the voices of the dead and manipulating the voices of the living beyond their physical limits. Whence the origins of modern sonic monsters, and an exponential increase in the forms of monstrosity. The point-of-view of the dead establishes a counter-taxonomy, where perpetual putrefaction and amorphousness reign, while the cutting knife of montage creates unspeakable and impossible anatomies. [5] Jean Baudrillard, in L’echange symbolique et la mort, analyzes the manner in which certain individualized techniques of communication with the dead (such as 19th century spiritualism) circumvent the powers held by the priesthood due to their monopoly in mediating death. One might argue that certain contemporary aestheticized confrontations with death have become one such technique, and that in our epoch of electronic instantaneity and invisibility what must be circumvented is the pernicious and rampant disembodiment of authority. Thus reimagining the Danse Macabre has vast deontological implications.

The doll, simulacrum of the body, is an object of the most profound psychic projections, the ultimate floating signifier. As such, it is particularly adequate to express, and to counteract, that most empty of signifiers, death. Nedjar’s dolls are thaumaturgic, fulfilling the antithetical conditions of magical objects: simultaneously practical and aesthetic, constructed and confabulated, causally projective and psychically introspective. Through these dolls, life is expressed not through icons or metaphors, but as metamorphosis; not through normative forms, but as abnormal deformations; not as signs of a collective unconscious, but in its moments of radical singularity; marks of accident, not essence. As monsters, these singular representations of the human body in extremis collapse natural and psychic categories into a magma of sheer disfiguration and distortion. How, then, are they to be grasped? These are performative objects, not sculptural ones; they demand mise-en-scène, not mere display; they question the separation between theater and museum, display and performance.

Listen... Listen to Nedjar’s own voice sonically staged by Gregory Whitehead in the marionette theater Danse macabre, telling the story of the dolls in Yiddish glossolalia, Yiddish babble, a Yiddish eviscerated of all semantic depth, but all the more meaningful for that loss. [6] A language mournful and plaintive, furious and imploring, perhaps adequate to the nonsense that is death. A language appropriate for a Danse Macabre, a Holocaust memorial, a Totentanz for the 21st century. Listen... 

Figure 1. Danse Macabre I [the marionette theater], Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2009), photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 2. Michel Nedjar, Poupées [Dolls], photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 3. Michel Nedjar, Poupées [Dolls], photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 4. Danse Macabre II [the installation], Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2009), photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 5. Danse Macabre II [the installation], Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2009), photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 6. Danse Macabre II [the installation], Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2009), photo Allen S. Weiss

Figure 7. Danse Macabre II as shadow theater [the installation], Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2009), photo Allen S. Weiss

Notes

(All photographs are by Allen S. Weiss.)

1. Cited from Allen S. Weiss and Gregory Whitehead, L’Indomptable (radio documentary on dolls broadcast on the Atelier de la Création Radiophonique of France Culture, 22 December 1996).
2. The first part of my presentation at the Embodiment of Authority colloquium, “On the Demonic in Music,” was derived from my Varieties of Auditory Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Errant Bodies Press, 2008), and served as a musicological prolegomena to these thoughts on the Danse Macabre.
3. Clayton Eshleman, Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship (Los Angeles, Mercer & Aitchison, 1989), 11.
4. These reflections were at the source of the exhibition on dolls that I curated at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, with an accompanying catalogue, Poupées (Paris, Gallimard / Haute Enfance, 2004).
5. The relation between the new technologies at the origins of modernism and a transfigured relation to death is the subject of my Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
6. This Danse macabre exists in three forms: marionette theater, installation, performance. The marionette theater ran from January-July 2004 as part of the Poupées exhibition at the Halle Saint Pierre, with a new version created for the In Transit festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, June 2009: mise-en-scène Allen S. Weiss, dolls and voice Michel Nedjar, sound Gregory Whitehead, puppetry Mark Sussman, lighting Boualem Ben Gueddach. The installation version was created by the same team for the In Transit festival at the HKW in 2009;  it is a large cube containing six of Nedjar’s dolls (in the form of masks) which are visible through various peepholes and lenses, with sonic works by Christof Migone, “Anse Acabre”; Georgia Spiropoulos, “Brut”; Claude Wampler, “And She Finally Goes To Sleep”; Gregory Whitehead, “Danse Macabre,” the latter based the longer HSP version; these can be heard on their respective web sites. The performance version, which is derived from my contribution to the catalogue Poupées entitled “Le principe de la Fève,” is a solo that I have performed at PS122 (New York), L’Institut International de la Marionnette (Charleville-Mézières), L’École des Beaux-Arts (Lyon), the HKW (Berlin), as well as in private settings.