Depriving women

Elin Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis is remarkable in a number of ways. It manages to bring together essays that have been influential over the years in feminist theatre criticism in a way that forms a coherent extended argument. The argument goes to the heart of debates about the coercive force of identification in theatrical mimesis and the possibilities of a critical spectatorship that can account for identification’s necessary role in the formation of one’s identity, but that can also view this as alterable by the spectator herself. The critical process that Diamond describes as enabling this alterability is derived from three complementary sources: Brecht’s alienation effect (specifically the gestus), Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” and Irigiray’s concept of mimétisme. She shows how these critical approaches, embodied—in a strong sense—in the work of feminist playwrights, performance artists, and actors, give the lie to the fixed nature of identity by showing the spectator how to view her life historically. That is, subject to change, and more importantly, self-alteration.

A further remarkable aspect is that the shape her argument takes comes from the transitions of the meaning of the word “unmaking” in three dictionary definitions of the word, and what each means for the act of “unmaking mimesis”: “(1) to deprive of position, rank, or authority; (2) to ruin, destroy; (3) to alter the characteristics of” (xiii). Definition one is considered in relation to late nineteenth-century realism, which she aligns with scientific and medical positivism, whose “deprivation of authority” occurs through its contamination by the feminine-as-hysteria in its very attempts to contain it positivistically. Definition two is considered in relation to Brecht’s attempts to “ruin” classical mimesis, and is applied to the theaters of Aphra Behn and Caryl Churchill as gestic subversions of patriarchy. Definition three is examined in relation to attempts by black playwright Adrienne Kennedy and postmodern feminist performances by Robbie McCauley, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin to “alter the characteristics of” mimesis, producing a “feminist mimesis based not on truth-models or psychic projections but on contiguities: subjects-in-relation, subjects-in-time” (xv).

While Diamond tends to reduce all concepts of mimetic representation to a Platonic model—the anti-Platonic focus of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, very much concerned with mimetic models, shows such a reduction to be implausible—nonetheless she is correct in noting an inevitable substrate of Platonic mimesis in theatrical representation. Insofar as Plato’s ideal and “true” mimesis is male-identified, the problem Diamond sees for women is how to develop a form of mimesis that resists being either absorbed by the “saming” power of patriarchy or simply expelled as never meeting the requirements for sameness. Irigaray appears to provide a way out with “mimétisme,” translated roughly as “mimicry,” mimesis with a difference. It uses the patriarchal forms of mimesis while at the same time demonstrating their arbitrary and contingent nature, allowing them to be manipulated for the purposes of a woman’s desire and against the overdeterminations of a patriarchal model. The concept is extended beyond sexual politics to confront the problematics of racial construction. The most brilliant analysis in the book is applied to Adrienne Kennedy’s theater, with that playwright’s phantasmatic identifications with the paradigms of white literature and popular culture—especially film—and her painful self-examination of an interiorized colonialism. Here the interdependency of, and tensions between, identification and identity are most lucidly and complexly explicated.

Given her desire to conceive of the critical spectatorial moment as a moment of recognition of being in history, in flux, and, therefore, with the opportunity to seize the forces of apparent determination and turn them against themselves, Diamond uses Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit, or “now-time”: “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Given that contemporary historicism has jettisoned the Hegelian-Marxist sense of predictable law-like development in history—the once necessary foundation to replace the notion of a fixed human nature—reliance on Benjamin’s messianic concept of history seems the most obvious alternative. But...