Questions on the Subject of Imitation: A Reflection on de Chaillé’s le Désordre du Discours
BY STAFF WRITER KATHERINE KAPLAN ’22
On the subject of recitation Bailliart recited:
Poetry. At least he spoke like it was
And it felt like it
Not the angry or mournful poetry one might think of as
Spoken aloud
But a lilting tone that grew until it turned
Into song
Fanny de Chaillé’s le Désordre du Discours production for Princeton’s 2019 French Theater Festival left me with countless open questions. De Chaillé’s productionrecreates L’Ordre du Discours, a lecture which philosopher and historian Michel Foucault gave in 1970 at the Collége de France, now performed by Guillaume Bailliart nearly 49 years later. This first lesson was written down, but no recording or description of how Foucault gave the lecture exists. De Chaillé makes use of strong theatrics to bring Foucault’s words to life. Bailliart started in the audience, banged on his desk to start the show and moved to the stage which contained only a table with a chair behind it, on which sat a table-top microphone, a written, bound copy of the speech, and glasses and a bald cap that when worn imitate the appearance of Foucault. Baillart used all of this to refer to the ideas in this speech about how we as a society order discourse. Foucault’s speech discussed the idea that:
Throughout society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed by a number of procedures, whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to control random events, to dodge the heavy, formidable materiality.
Source: Lewis Center for the Arts, Marc Domage
De Chaillé used the way the speech was performed to emphasize the meaning of Foucault’s own words, while also adding metatextual layers about what it means to participate in the redistribution and consumption of speech. I could not discuss this performance only on the basis of words since that is of course, not the point. So instead I am going to attempt to describe some of the more memorable performance moments.
The performance started with Bailliart in the audience, and he banged on his desk three times bang BANG Bang and he was up, the words had started. And as he continued to speak he would add his own beat to the poetry to emphasize those moments when the beat went away, silence as strong as what was written.
And when describing a thinker, he sat on a table, then reclined on the table, then sat up again, dressed as Foucault (bald cap and glasses properly placed on his head) but imitating Rodin, hand supporting his chin for one line, then the back of his head, angling the table microphone to fit his awkward stances, so that his new positions could still be heard, so that the message continues to be carried. The author stays the author as his position changes.
Then later he is face down, speaking of reaching out for meaning as he grasps, face still against the table, reaching out for the items of the author (the glasses and cap and speech), reaching for something. He was not panicked, arms flailing out, but was slowly spreading out and around in a practiced, ordered manner.
It was the question of what it means to imitate that most interested me from this performance. After all, the voice in your head kindly narrating the words that I’ve written sounds different from the one in my head. It will always sound different, even if the meaning is perfectly received. Meaning changes sound in each person’s head. But does it matter how I meant for you to hear them? If you find your own interpretation, choose to read it your own way, is that less true than mine?
In one section of the performance, while Foucault’s words discuss the relationship between author and text, Bailliart puts on glasses and a bald cap to imitate Foucault. Holding a copy of the speech in his hand, he asks the audience what it means to copy an author’s words. There is an Oscar Wilde quote which I love, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Part of what I love about this quote is that in repeating it, I am demonstrating my thoughts as someone else’s opinion. And by simply repeating this sentence, in plain text, with nothing of my own added to your experience of reading those words, I am, without question, taking someone else’s idea. But where is the line between recitation and originality? Part of the irony of my mentioning that Oscar Wilde quote, is that I started in the middle of the thought. Immediately preceding those words, he quotes Emerson, who said, “Nothing is more rare in any man…than an act of his own”. Nobody’s thoughts exist in a vacuum. We are all responding to each other, and this idea is truly felt in Désordre du Discours, as de Chaillé is simultaneously bringing to life and responding to Foucault’s ideas.
Listening to this speech (or should I say watching) made me think of the idea of Death of the Author, as described in French theorist (and contemporary of Foucault) Barthes’s essay of the same name, and Foucault’s own essay “What is an Author?”. Where Barthes argues that the author does not matter and it is only the reader’s interpretation, Foucault introduces the idea of the author function, in which an author is socially constructed, not a physical person but an ideology. He states how:
A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts…the author’s name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.
The author is therefore not just a speaker, but a way to group certain pieces of speech/discourse together into one, more meaningful ideology. Where Barthes viewed the Death of the Author as a liberation of the reader from authorial intent, Foucault instead describes the author function as one of those ways of organizing and controlling discourse as discussed in L’Ordre du Discours. In other words, the author groups certain discourse together into one ideological figure. In this same essay he states, “Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.” While one imagines an author’s work provides them an immortal legacy, Foucault argues it instead kills the author, replacing the individual with their collection of ideas and discourse as seen by society. Foucault himself is therefore not being imitated or expressed in de Chaillé’s performance, but the idea of Foucault as an author is being invoked to bring life to his words and adapt what they mean for today’s societal interpretation of him. De Chaillé’s recreation is an incredible performance, using the ideology and mythologized figure of the author Foucault to discuss and perform his own ideas.
There are many questions about how to interpret these ideas in today’s world. For example, what does it mean to make something original and when does a piece of art belong to the artist? Is music that samples all of its beats from other songs breaking copyright? How about fanfiction? Or memes where the entire point is to reuse the same format? Or the countless remakes of movies or television shows being made? Or how about when the artist is found to be guilty of sexual assault — can we separate them from their art?
Especially in a world where certain creators are so public, be it on social media or otherwise, there is also the question of the author performing themselves, what exactly is it you are imitating when you respond to an author, their texts or the idea of them? In interacting with one’s fans, it is impossible not to perform some form of oneself. What does it mean to perform the idea of an author? De Chaillé certainly created a performance of Foucault, but what does it mean for an author to perform themselves? The film The End of the Tour tells the story of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s five-day interview of David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest. This novel is often seen as being deeply personal, the main character being viewed as an almost autobiographical reflection of Wallace. There are moments in the film when Lipsky is questioning whether Wallace is performing the public’s view of Wallace to Lipsky. Yet just as Lipsky seems to judge Wallace for potentially performing his novel and author function, he is attempting to get Wallace to admit to allegations of drug use, fitting him into society’s interpretation of who he is. There is therefore almost a conflict in the movie between Lipsky trying to write about him as an author and Wallace wanting to be viewed as a person beyond his author function.
Everyone imitates others, is influenced by society, authors, and works that stand out to them. De Chaillé does a brilliant job of using this constant imitation of the ideology of authors to give new life to a piece of Foucault’s work, bringing his ideas of how we understand and organize speech into the context of today.