Performing the Visual: Absent Referents, Swimming through Turkey, and Iconic Angels

Session Coordinator: Marsha Watson
Dept. of English, University of Nebraska at Omaha
PO Box 3588, Omaha, NE 68103-9960
mwatson@mail.unomaha.edu

Visual Rhetoric and the Absent Referent: The Unseen Supplement

What is seen is most often implicitly taken to be imbued with presence in the realm of the visual, thus, that which is registered visually is a ‘present referent.’ Yet the human visual perceptual process uses both what is seen and unseen to make meaning out of sensory information; as Anne Seward Barry observes, our perceptual process “reduces reality to its simplest shape and fills in empty space with something that isn’t really there” (Visual Intelligence 65). Thus, at the level of the most basic functioning of the human brain, what is unseen–what does not necessarily register visually, but is implied or signified, has a semiotic function. The unseen operates as an absent referent when perceptual process is indexed through language. In indexing the unseen, an absent referent defers and differentiates meaning, revealing the actions of différance. It is through the indexing function, then, that visual rhetoric can be understood to encompass Derrida’s notion of the supplement. In this paper, I will examine the implications of the absent referent as supplement in visual rhetoric.

Marsha Watson
University of Nebraska at Omaha
mwatson@mail.unomaha.edu

Swimming in Context: Corporeal Texts and Byronic Revision

In 1810, Byron swam the Hellespont, the body of water dividing Europe from Asia, west from east, civil from savage, purity from sex, not to mention Hero from Leander in the myth that begins with Ovid and runs through Christopher Marlowe. The feat was both physical and visual, a chance for Byron to brag and exhibit his body as an object of desire. This paper will investigate how absences reveal something about the visual quality of the body swimming, or not swimming, as in Sir William Allan’s painting that shows Byron after his swim gazing at a young Turkish girl who returns his gaze. One means of investigating these absences will be an analysis of my own experience of swimming the Hellespont this summer. My swim relocates the Hellespont as referent–it is no longer Byron’s Hellespont, or maybe is very much Byron’s and no longer Leander’s. My swim is an act of reading Byron entangled with Byron’s act of reading Marlowe and Ovid. Byron is the absent referent in representations of my swim in the same way that Byron’s actual swim is absent from Allan’s painting, and Marlowe and much else are absent from Byron’s own self representations.

Christopher Flynn
St. Edward’s University
chrisbflynn@msn.com

Image / Idol / Icon: Absence and Transcendence in Angels in America

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America dates from the foundational years of queer theorizing in the academy; it shares key theoretical commitments with its major academic contemporaries. Yet Kushner also articulates a corollary to these commitments that queer theorists tend to ignore: his play is infused with a theoretically sophisticated representation of spirituality that John McClure (among others) terms post-secular. Especially through its staging of visual images as icons—representations of absence that gesture indirectly toward an un-representable presence—the play offers an intimation of transcendent meaning not in despite of but rather through its epistemological and representational limitations. In this, the play invokes a Kierkegaardian sense of irony that resonates provocatively with queer theoretical insights even as it also adds something quite distinct from the queer academic mainstream: the play exemplifies the post-secular queer. The implications extend beyond critics who focus on queer sexualities; the post-secular queer constitutes an illuminating aspect of the broader emergence of the “ethical turn” in contemporary criticism.

Norman W. Jones
Ohio State University-Mansfield
nwjones@ucla.edu