Autokomunikācijas performativitāte: autora mnemoniskais ķermenis un autokatalītiskie aspekti

Abstract

The notion of auto-communication – a communication from and to oneself – has been analyzed in-depth by Tartu–Moscow school semiotician Yuri Lotman (Юрий Лотман, 1922–1993). Such individual historiography forms as diary, marginalia, and notes, as Lotman defines, are communicative forms that not only operate on a mnemonic level but can also generate and supply a piece of new information through I–I and I–s/he models. From a perspective of performance studies, the process of auto-communication has not been analyzed with relation to the individual’s performativity. This combination raises a question on the autocatalytic connection: does auto-communication is a self-performance which is primarily intended to surpass auto-level? In terms of artistic modelling, we can conclude that those performances that are based on auto-communicative forms are never detached from 23the author’s mnemonic-body – either they are offering factual embodiment, or communicator’s fictional representation, or invariants of alternative presence. In recent years in contemporary Latvian theatre the author’s reflective mnemonic-body has been performed through multiple strategies. For instance, in a documentary theatre piece “Reading Room” (2015, theatre festival “Homo Novus”), the diary authors are individually reading their recordings in a dialogue form with spectators. In a docufiction “Being a Nationalist” (2017, Dirty Deal Teatro), dramatist Matīss Gricmanis is one of four actors introspectively tackling his personal experience linked with a right-wing party and nationalist formations. Whereas dilogy at the New Riga Theatre – “Lake of Hope” (2015) and “Lake of Hope is Frozen” (2018) – both by Vladislavs Nastavševs, are meta-auto-communication examples. In these performances, two different actors are playing the director and dissecting not only integration, cultural biases, and problematics of intolerance in Latvian society, but also polemics of artistic properties. The self-communication and its embodiment allow witnessing proto-autocatalytic phenomena regarding self-identity organization. In this article, I will argue whether I–I and I–s/he models that are later applied in artistic modelling of self-performativity as ‘products’ of the auto-communication are cause for their own reaction. Highly likely – it is both the catalyst and the final product.