The Ethics of Representation: Punctum Language, Evental Photography, and Affective Scenography in Howard Barker’s Drama

Abstract

Howard Barker (1946-) is a versatile artist. Not only is he a long-standing dramatist (more than 100 plays) and poet (6 volumes of published poetry since 1985), he is also a professional painter and photographer. Significantly, Barker has also come to assume increasing responsibility for the production of his own plays as director and dramaturg (including sound and costume design). This multi-mediality and poetic style is vividly reflected not only in Barker’s language (intensely musical and densely poetic: in its phrasing, imagery, rhythm and metaphor) but also in his highly elaborate audial-visual aesthetics of production. Accordingly, this essay seeks to demonstrate how the thematic content of a scene (given Barker’s tragic values – eventual ethics of speculation self-overcoming, proximal relationship with the other, obscurity, irrationality, desire, pain, anxiety, and death) and its mode of aesthetic presentation/figuration (language, textual composition and dramatic/scenographic dynamics) are inextricably entangled. This essay seeks to explore the aesthetic and ethical aspects of language/text, image/photography and scenography by dwelling on two paradigmatic scenes in The Europeans and Judith in conjunction with an investigation of the eventual-cinematic role/nature of image/photograph in Barker. Tackling the foregoing issues, particularly given the affective-thematic complexity and manifold dynamics of the selected scenes (two traumatized individual characters, spiritual-carnal proximity between them, carnal light, nakedness haptic gaze, and absence of touch), demands an equally nuanced and multifaceted theoretical framework capable of unraveling their aesthetic and ethical facets. For this purpose I have drawn here on Barthes, Levinas, Lyotard and Deleuze in an attempt to reveal the way various aesthetic, ontological and ethical layers are interlaced and to demonstrate their implications.