Identity Plays: Life as Art
David Massey
A paper presented at the
Arts Intersections Symposium
Arts, disability, happiness, and well-being
Griffith University Logan Campus
17-18 July 2008
Identity Plays: Life as Art
Contents

Life
Art

Life as art


Play
Identity

Identity plays

Players

All the world's a stage, And all the men and
women merely players; They have their
exits and their entrances.
Jacques
in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy
As You Like It
Comings and goings
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going -Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Kozan Ichikyo, died 1360, aged 77



Composed on the morning of his death
Source - http://www.salon.com/weekly/zen960805.html
Entanglements

Attachments, separations, losses
 Joys and woes
Man (sic) was made for Joy & Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.

William Blake: Auguries of Innocence
Life

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, (Macbeth, Act V, scene v, 23-27)
A dream?
BOAT, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July–
Ever drifting down the stream-Lingering in the golden gleam-Life, what is it but a dream?

Lewis Carroll
Chuang Tzu

Chinese philosopher
399 - 295 B.C.

Tzu or butterfly?


Man who dreamed he
was a butterfly - or a
butterfly now dreaming
he is a man?
Butterfly Dreaming

Raina Donovan

Indigenous Painter

Bowraville, NSW

Image is the copyright of the artist
who generously granted permission
for it to be used in this presentation.
I wish to acknowledge the assistance of
Arts Mid North Coast Inc
Art

Artists and Artworks
Art works
Previous slide


Lawrence Daws:
Margaret Olley:

Source: Art for Humanity; Australian Red Cross


The Far Shore
Eucharist Lillies
http://www.redcross.org.au/howyoucanhelp_ArtforHumanity.htm
Psychiatry unit residents

Source Libby Woodhams
Lawrence Daws

Daws [in The Far Shore] brings to his
work a sense of foreboding mixed with an
almost dreamlike tranquility. Always
present however, no matter where he
locates the physical geography of his art,
is another landscape - the inner landscape
of the unconscious mind.


Dr Candice Bruce, 2006
http://www.robingibson.net/public_html/DAWS/Daws06.html
Other players
Audiences
 Curators
 Sponsors
 Critics

Consumers
 Presenters
 Performers
 Poiesis

Poiesis



The process of making art
Poiesis is a creative process which
transforms the world, from which the
term poetry derives.
All artists have the potential to make
works of art which transform the world
and “turn the soul around”.

Poets; Painters; Composers; Writers
Life as art


Poiesis, in relation to human life, is “a way
of making our lives into life-stories.”
Furthermore, “each life-story cries out to
be ‘imitated’, that is, transformed into
the story of a life.”

Richard Kearney, 2002: 131
Living/telling


A life as lived is inseparable from a life as
told (Jerome Bruner, 1987: 31).
Offering a narrative account of one’s life,
therefore,
constitutes,
not
merely
describes, who we are. It is an identity
constitutive activity which, I posit, is
usefully understood as an artistic
endeavour.
A work of art?


But couldn’t everyone’s life become
a work of art? (Michel Foucault,
1984: 350)
Could become a work of art or is
a work of art?
If we become


If "we become the autobiographical
narratives by which we 'tell about' our
lives” (Bruner, 1987: 15), then surely this
warrants our careful attention, for our
lives may well depend on it.
Are we not all Scheherazades?

(Massey, 2005)
But

What to tell?


How to tell?



Medium; form; tone; style;
Who to tell?


Content: Selections; omissions
Will they listen? Will they be receptive?
When to tell?
Where to tell?
Selections; omissions

What would you select to tell about
your life?


Why?
What would you omit to tell?

Why?
Not just any


Not just any autobiography will do
(Bruner, 1987: 14).
Since “we are virtually from the start
expressions of the culture that nurtures
us” (Bruner, 2002: 87)

Life stories must mesh, within a
community of life stories.

Bruner, 1987: 21.
Meshing and sharing

Tellers and listeners must share some
“deep structure” about the nature of a
“life,” for if the rules of life-telling are
altogether arbitrary, tellers and listeners
will surely be alienated by a failure to
grasp what the other is saying or what he
(sic) thinks the other is hearing.

Jerome Bruner, 1987: 21
Well-formed lives



The well-formed
exceedingly rare.
life
[life/story]
is
But what is a well-formed life, a “wellwrought self-narrative”?
Keeping the options open so that one does
not become fixated on one story and thus
form a fixed identity.

See Bruner, 1997: 155-156
Life virtues


The virtues of life are comparable to
the virtues of good writing - style,
connectedness, grace, elegance.
[Foucault] took both his picture of the
world and the pieces of his life and put
them together into a new outlook, a new
way of writing, a new self.

Alexander Nehamas, 1998
Borrowed lives

Most people actually lead borrowed lives,
stories told by other people. They
occasionally make small differences here
or there to the stories they are told, but
a small difference leaves you essentially
the same as the rest of the world. It is in
that sense that they live lives of quiet
desperation - or, at least, quiet lives.

Nehamas, 1998
Play

Playful; frolicsome; enjoyment

Dramatic Performance

Manoeuvre: tactic; strategy

Imagination
The reality of imagination


We do not apprehend things only through
actual experience. We can also, given the
right conditions, grasp it through the
imagination, and in such a direct and
physical way that it becomes utterly real.
As writers [artists?] we have the duty –
and we ought to have the capacity – to
work this imaginative trick or miracle.

David Malouf, 1987: 22
Nations as imagined Communities

One can only
understand nations
imaginatively.
Identity

Who we are

But who are we?

We are storied beings
 the stories told - by ourselves and
others - about our lives constitute
who we are
Always already

Human life is always already an implicit
story (Kearney, 2002: 129).


Beginnings (entrances), middles (entanglements) and
ends (exits)
Each life-story cries out to be ‘imitated’,
that is, transformed into the story of a
life (Kearney, 2002: 131).
Questing

Life in quest of narrative.


Paul Ricoeur, 1991
Autobiographical accounts are “an
endless prelude.”

Louis Renza, 1980
Identity play

If one accepts life as a play (art) and,
secondly, that we are all players (life
artists), how do we play or how might
we play so that we are not ‘merely
players’, or not poor players who
‘strut and fret’, but good players who
live ‘refined’ lives?
Identity plays

Poietic

Political

Ethical

Ecological

Motility
Poietic plays

Telos: Making identities into a
particular configuration: a distinctive
form or shape.



Makers shape things into being, granting them
their intrinsic identity.
Alberto Manguel, 2007: 13
Synthesizing the heterogenous.

Paul Ricoeur, 1991: 21
Life Forms

My Many Selves. The
Quest for a Plausible
Harmony.


Wayne Booth
Flawed perfection

Maria Callas: her life
and music
Political plays

Telos: preserving and enhancing the
integrity of one’s identity.

Negotiating identities

Claiming and reclaiming identities

Resisting identities
Narrative Artifice



Narratives of hope and narratives of resistance
capture the inevitable conflict that women feel
when they become subjects of fertility
medicine.
On the one hand, they must remain hopeful; on
the other, they must not surrender themselves
completely.
Resistance narratives help us see how women
can reconcile the experience of a strong desire
to have children with the desire to remain
authentic and whole.

Aline Kalbian, 2005
This is my home!


Jessie Lennon’s narrative, I’m the One
That Know This Country!, … “speaks back
to power from the other side.”
It “testifies to displacements of her
people through a process of colonisation
and the British nuclear tests at
Maralinga.”

Kay Schaffer, 2004: 15-16
Ethical plays

Telos: Aiming for the good, with and
for others, in just institutions.


Paul Ricoeur, 1992
Groping for some goodness, alone
and with others, in calamitous
situations.

David Massey, 2000
Recuperating

While emphasizing the need to recuperate
the victim’s voice from the silence of
oblivion, the narrator [Ida Fink, Holocaust
survivor] … often falter[s] as she realizes
that words circumvent the events but
never palpate the horror.

Dorota Glowacka, 2002: 107
Storyteller as witness

[Ida Fink, in her short stories, which are
reconstructions
of
‘true’
events]
discovers that the task of the storyteller
as witness is to allow the time of the
Other to creep into the interstices of
the present and inflect by its difference
the complacency of memory.

Dorota Glowacka, 2002: 107
Ecological plays




Telos: connecting with others and
finding one’s place in the world.
Connecting with those not only similar to,
but also different from, ourselves
Place and home
By art we come to feel at home in the
world.

Brian Etter (2006: 16)
Motility plays


Telos: to stay alive and be lively:
vitality, fluency, movement.
This continuous movement, life’s incessant
sliding and flowing.


James Olney, 1998: 317
For all its grave stillness, there is nothing
more dynamic than a corpse.

Robert Harrison, 1994: 93.
Going on

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never
know, in the silence you don't know, you
must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.


Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 382.
You are the music while the music lasts.
T.S. Eliot
Recapitulation





Poietic
Political
Ethical
Ecological
Motility
Making
Positioning
Orienting
Connecting
Rhythming
Life art



Life art is fine art
It is fine in the sense that the ‘end’ it
seeks is a good end: a refined life of
truth, beauty and goodness.
Parrhesia: This is what I believe and I will
express it even though I expose myself to
possible ridicule, danger or death in doing so.

The truths which are revealed are the moral qualities
of the speakers (life-artists).
A refined life


To live well is to live a ‘refined life’
as an artist, making and remaking
fitting identities.
A refined life, in other words, is a
life which is artfully finessed:
finessed by continually executing
poietic, political, ethical, ecological
and motility identity plays.
Refinement

Poietically articulate:

unarticulate or inarticulate

Politically adept

Ethically discerning

Ecologically attuned

Motility fluent

Lifely rather than deathly
Sweet momentum

I slide down the green walls into the bay
to feel what I started out with, what I
lost so quickly and for so long: the sweet
momentum, the turning force underfoot,
and those brief, rare moments of grace.

Bruce, 50, a character in Tim Winton’s novel Breath.
The refined life


The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
The refined life is worth living.
A refined life


Alice Wexler’s (1995) account of her mother
with Huntington’s Chorea
Mapping Fate: A
Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research.
While attending to her mother’s pathology,
Wexler does not reduce her to a syndrome –
cultural
(oppressed
woman),
psychiatric
(depressed housewife), or biomedical (victim of
hereditary disease). Rather, she recuperates
her and places her at the center of family
dynamics.

G. Thomas Couser, 2004: 191
Demystification & restoration


Wexler’s book demystifies her mother’s
behaviour, restoring dignity to her
mother and meaning to her life.
Endowed with unexpected depth and
complexity.

G. Thomas Couser, 2004: 191
Making art work


Hearing the moral impulse in others’ stories
enables us to become part of their struggle to
reenchant a disenchanted world (Frank, 2002:
18).
Engaging deeply and lovingly with others’
lifeartworks, I suggest, attentive to the moral
impulse in their lifeart, may enable us to
contribute to the enchantment of the world, the
enrichment of lives and, contra Macbeth, to see
life as signifying something. ■
References

Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso.

Beckett, Samuel (1979) The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Picador.



Blake, W. (1988) Auguries of innocence. In David V. Erdman (Ed.) The Complete Poetry and Prose
of William Blake, with a commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, Newly
Revised Edition.
Bruner, J. (1987) Life as narrative. Social Research, 54 (1), 11-32.
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
Booth, Wayne C. (2006) My Many Selves. The Quest for a Plausible Harmony. Logan, Utah: Utah
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
Bruner, J. (2002) Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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
Carrier, D. (1998) Alexander Nehamas. Interview. Bomb Magazine, 65, 36-41.

Carroll, Lewis. (1903) Life is but a Dream. The Hunting of the Snark and Other Poems and
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
Couser, G.T. (2004) Genome and Genre. DNA and Life Writing. In Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics
and Life Writing. New York: Cornell University Press.

Etter, B. (2006) Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in
Hegelian Aesthetics. New York: SUNY Press.

Frank, A.W. (2002) Why study people’s stories? The dialogical ethics of narrative analysis.
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
Glowacka, D. (2002) Chapter 6. Disappearing Traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Fink’s Literary
Testimony, and Holocaust Art. In D. Glowacka and S. Boos (Eds) Between Ethics and Aesthetics.
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
Harrison, R. P. (1994) The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kalbian, Aline H. (2005) Narrative Artifice and Women’s Agency, Bioethics, 19 (2), 93-111.
References continued

Kearney, R. (2002) On Stories. London and New York: Routledge.

Malouf, D. (1987) Essay. In Dorothy Green and David Headon (Eds) Imagining the Real.
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
Manguel, A. (2007) The City of Words. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Massey, D. (2000) Ethics as Ordeal. QAI Newsletter, December, 21-35.

Massey, D. (2005) Identity Pragmatics. A paper originally presented at the colloquium Applied
Ethics: Challenges and Explorations. Carseldine campus, Queensland University of Technology,
1-2 June, 2001.

Nehamas, A. (1998) 6. A Fate for Socrates’ Reason: Foucault on the Care of the Self. The Art
of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Olney, J. (1998) Memory and Narrative. The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press.

Renza, L. (1980) The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography. In James Olney (ed.)
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References continued

Ricoeur, P. (1991) Chapter 2. Life in Quest of Narrative. In David Wood (Ed.) On Paul Ricoeur:
Narrative and Interpretation. London and New York: Routledge.

Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schaffer, K. (2004) Narrative Lives and Human Rights: Stolen Generation Narratives and the
Ethics of Recognition. Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture. Journal of the Association for the
Study of Australian Literature, 3, 5-26.

White, P. (1983) Flaws in the Glass. London: Penguin.

Winton, T. (2008) Breath. Hamish Hamilton.