Lights Out and an Ethics of Spectatorship, or Can the Subaltern Scream?

Abstract

In her seminal work on the body in pain, Elaine Scarry theorizes a chasm of incommunicability between the person in pain and other persons to whom she might try to communicate that pain. This chasm suggests that any performative representation of pain will not only be incapable of capturing the experience of the original person in pain, but will also always‐already be incapable of communicating the nature of that experience to an audience. For those who hope that performances, both live and mediated, can help to communicate across lines of gender, class, culture, and life experience, to promote intercultural understanding and international social justice, this chasm of incommunicability seems potentially dangerous—and potentially productive. One cannot know exactly the pain of another, regardless of similarity or difference, and so one must find other ways to affectively empathize with the experience of pain.In this paper, I examine the play Lights Out, by Manjula Padmanabhan, with a specific eye to how this play might provide us with a new argument for ethically witnessing the pain of others. Lights Out is centered on an “Other”, her experience of pain, and her desperate plea for help. This cry for help is concretized in the screams of that woman (who, importantly, never appears on‐stage) who is being gang‐raped in the abandoned apartment building directly next‐door to the building in which the play is set. Can this woman's scream create a space in which she can represent herself? Can we apply an analysis of her scream to a larger historiographical project? By connecting theories of ethical encounters with the other, voice, subaltern studies, and affective response, I argue for the importance of the expression of pain in creating the potential for subaltern representation and ethical response.