Material Image-Thinking

The scene titled ‘Narrative Stuttering’ from my 2019 video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. For most of the eight-minute episode, Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, holding the script, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is trying desperately to tell his story – the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him and those around him – but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and, as you see in Figure 1.1, Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. This physicality is a primary point this ending of the episode is to make. But there is much more happening here; and all of that participates in the artwork, its effectivity as affective, and its status as an imaginative presentation of a very sad story.

First, these two figures can do what they do because they have a space in which to do it. That space is a stage; hence, a fictional and visual one. The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth, at times making Don Quijote almost seem floating. The stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. In line with this brief description, I consider the theatrical setting as a material ‘theoretical fiction’. It is material, built as a theatre. And, once the figures are acting in it, it is a fiction – one that helps our thinking about, in this case, the social issue of empathy. Freud came up with the term ‘theoretical fiction’ to justify his fanciful story, in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. A fiction indeed. But elaborating the story led him to, then helped him with, the discovery and elaboration of the Oedipus complex, a theoretical advance in his thinking. In that case, the fiction consisted of a narrative. The concept of ‘theoretical fiction’ is a broader version of this. From 2008 on, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I have deployed that notion in a variety of films and video installations.