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GENDER AS RITUAL AND ‘POETIC RITUALITY’ IN CONTEMPORARY ‘BIOSCIENCE DRAMA’
The blinds and curtains double as video screens in some scenes. The specta¬
tors are separated into two halves sitting respectively in front and behind the
“box-room.” Thus, the audience is not only watching the action on stage but
is also observing itself watching futur de luxe. The stage box/room resembles
a glass case, as if a laboratory experiment is taking place, with the actors as
“laboratory animals.”
Wolfgang Braungart has argued that aesthetic rituality in the form of a
ritualised repetition of various aesthetic norms such as certain metaphors,
topics, and genre patterns is a fundamental aspect of literature.** As a highly
intertextual play, futur de luxe features strong aesthetic rituality. As we will
see, its aesthetic construction and concept is determined by ritual, thus fea¬
turing “poetic rituality” in the sense Saskia Fischer intends. Knowledge and
ignorance, truth, and fate play significant roles in the drama. While circling
around the crucial question of the meaning of knowledge as in Sophocles’
Oedipus, Bauersima’s play toys with the Aristotelian categories of drama. The
play stringently features the three Aristotelian “unities” of place, time, and
unity of action. Spanning just a couple of hours, most of the play’s action takes
place inside a single room, whereas some scenes are shown as video projections
while the room (stage) is masked by blinds. Aesthetic liminality lies open when
one of the characters opens the blind and turns toward the audience. However,
Bauersima’s play does not only feature aesthetical liminality but also chal¬
lenges ethical liminality. The grotesque plot of futur de luxe as a whole follows
the structure of a gendered ritual of passage demonstrating the constitution
of the male subject in the process of signification. As Lacanian philosopher
Luce Irigaray points out in her key work Speculum of the Other Woman, the
Occidental concept of the subject in principle creates a male subject. This is
because this subject is constituted by the neglect and abjection of the female
as “the Other.” Following Irigaray, the neglect of the self-origin in the body of
the mother is a major aspect of the cultural abjection of the female. The result
is the image of a self-created and autonomous male subject:
The point being that man is the procreator, that sexual production-reproduction is
referable to his “activity” alone, to his “pro-ject” alone. Woman is nothing but the
receptacle that passively receives his product, even if sometimes, by the display of
her passively aimed instincts, she has pleaded, facilitated, even demanded that it be
placed within her. Matrix — womb, earth, factory, bank — to which the seed capital
is entrusted so that it may germinate, produce, grow fruitful, without woman being
able to lay claim to either capital or interest since she has only submitted “passively”
to reproduction. Herself held in receivership as a certified means of (re)production.
34 Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, 24.