Eve Sedgwick's Sensual Designs

A more promising sight

The First Time I Walked Out of a Lecture - Rose Edwards writes for the other half.

Now, I had been told that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is to queer theory what proverbial sliced bread is to the rest of the world, but I only had the vaguest of vague ideas what that might mean as I took my place in the audience. I wondered whether maybe I should have tried to read up beforehand. I wondered if I should be taking notes, and the adoring introduction being dished out like macaroni cheese didn’t give me much to go on.

For Eve, the hall darkened. Light shone up from the square of her notes onto her cropped white hair and her glasses. She was immensely unromantic in her body, a shapeless body, dressed in pale clothes that went with her pale hair and flat, glinting glasses. That effect which Lynch loves so much, the light-through-glasses rings around the eyes, sprung up as she bowed and bobbed her head. She started to speak.

She clicked past the title slide of her presentation, and the large screen behind her became sombre with an image of pieces of cloth sewn together, a mixed jumble of prints and dyeing techniques. The tiny pool of light on her face and shoulders made her a glinting, soft-tongued bust. The larger spread of unanticipated images opposite us swirled past like illustrations from a rather jumbled specialist art manual. Her voice, carrying its sibilance with its haltingly outre-Atlantique accent, wrapped me up in phrases so beautifully constructed that the half that I didn’t take on board seemed made to lull me into a sense of creation.

The tiny pool of light on her face and shoulders made her a glinting, soft-tongued bust.

I longed to have fabrics and paper beneath my hands, to set to with thread and ink, to see my skin coloured from the work. I gazed at images of the Buddha broken down into shapes and presences, and I suddenly wanted to study Buddhism. All the previously spurious phrases from the I-Ching, There is neither Being nor Emptiness etc, came alive in the sudden textures of her voice, the light and the absence of tactual sensuality to match the aural and visual sensuality of her essay.

How are we to take such a talk? Is it exploitative and misleading to present a work of personal value that disappoints those waiting for a discussion of queer theory? Is it unacceptably self-indulgent, all this talk of daily mysticism and fractal worlds caught in between drops of dye on water? Most important, perhaps, is the question of language: convoluted style, polysyllabic words, a certain assimilation of the language used in mysticism. Are these things irredeemable sins against the audience?

Or is it an act of playfulness to present an audience with what they were least expecting? When Waiting For Godot was given the epitaph “a play in which nothing happens, twice”, that was praise despite all the furious theatre-goers, indeed rather at their expense.

Performers have been playing with audiences for as long as there have been individuals willing to disappoint expectations, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick did it on Thursday night by presenting an example of avant-garde experimental music. Her performance denied the possibility of note-taking, induced a slightly hallucinogenic sense of wonder and in the bare lecture hall we experienced the relearning of academic sensuality.

By five o’clock Friday afternoon, all the Eve Sedgwick works in the library were out except for those in key texts. (However, if anyone would like a copy of her co-conspirator Laurie Anderson’s performance Ugly One With The Jewels, drop me a line.)

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