Probing Matter out of Place
Or what about a pie in the face!?
Three questions for Ante Ursić by Jenny Patschovsky & Benjamin Richter
In your article A Pie in the Face. Approaching Clown Politics1 you highlight pie throwing as an action from the clown tradition that is capable of overriding the established order and thus becoming the starting point for political statements. Can you tell us more about this act of pieing? In terms of clown play, one can undoubtedly observe an existing relationship with defilement. The act of pieing is a classical one. In these clown routines, often the low-status clown (the August or Counter-August) pies his co-clowns, be it on purpose or by accident. The high-status clown, the white face clown, is not immune to such exploits. Indeed, pieing can rapture the perceived and often stratified hierarchies in clown groups, suddenly inverting existing statuses. Being covered with whipped cream (or cheaper: shaving cream) changes the facial features drastically, sometimes so that the person pied is no longer recognisable. This non-recognisability refers to individual facial traits and issues around status, allowing a different form of sociality to emerge. In the slapstick classic Battle of the Century2 starring Laurel and Hardy, the protagonists start a pie fight which increasingly escalates. The pie fight begins quite banally when a pie vendor slips on a banana peel in the street. Rightly accusing Hardy of purposefully having rigged the banana peel, the pie vendor gets revenge by pieing Hardy in the face. Hardy then attempts to pie Laurel, and accidentally lands the pie on a bystander, who then seeks revenge through pieing yet another person; this
pattern is repeated domino style every time somebody gets pied. This scene suggests that resisting one’s appetite for sweet revenge is difficult. Social propriety seems to vaporise immediately, and anybody struck by a pie is folded into the indistinguishable mass of pied faces. One’s individual features vanish in pie, as do social class distinctions. It is a mode of pure affect, in which people seem to dissolve into one another, the pies serving as a binding material, unifying the bodies into one. The separation, between social codes and classes disappear, blurring the line between self and other. As each pied person looks the same, one can therefore also be the other. Hierarchies have dissolved; no one seems to be spared from the equalizing effect of being pied. I am not suggesting, however, that every pie fight has an equalizing effect on the voluntary and, in some cases, involuntary participants. Depending on the context however, the unrecognisability of facial features and status position, may open a zone of play where normative rules and codes of conduct are suspended. The issue around defilement in clown play is expandable beyond pieing. Leo Bassi makes excellent use of it in his act Angel. Here, Bassi smears himself from head to toe with honey. After being fully covered with this sticky, golden substance, he pours white feathers onto himself, which naturally adhere to the honey. Bassi transforms into a ruffled angel while musing about the clown as a figure of imperfection and the importance of noncompliance to market capitalism. The audience reacts to Bassi’s self-defilement with nervous laughter, which intensifies when Bassi threatens the audience with a hug. While the audience might enjoy the pleasure of watching someone in the act of defilement, it does not mean that the audience wants to take an active part in it. Still, part of Angel’s comic intensity is Bassi’s clown’s unpredictability. The danger of defilement (the hug) stays ever-present for the audiences. Defilement here, is not necessarily pejorative. Bassi’s defilement through honey and feathers produces an image of an angel (as ruffled as it may appear), and Bassi presents his clown, this angel of imperfection and vulnerability, as an aspirational figure. Indeed, the transformation evoked by defilement produces a performative force specific (yet not exclusive) to clown play. A particular case in point is provided by Elie Kudlak. In his solo show Flou, Kudlak applies yogurt to such an extent that it allows for the base makeup for his clown. I suggest, following Anthropologist Marry Douglas’ definition of dirt, that defilement in clowns work is the play with “matter out of place”.3 It is therefore telling, that Kudlak’s clown emerges at the moment when matter (yogurt) is considered “out of place” (on his face). The notion “matter out of place” implies that there is a right place for any matter. Any piece of matter must be in the correct category, well-defined, and understood. It is a way of acting and thinking, that the German’s so beautifully describe as Schubladendenken.4 People too, are categorised and defined and therefore, need to adhere to the ethos that is coupled with age, profession, status, and so on. Drawing on French Philosopher Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as the challenge of established orders and hierarchies, I suggest that the disorienting effect of turning matter out of its pre-described place possesses a particular political power that clowns tap into.5 Much clown play consists of transforming matter that was previously in the right place into matter out of place. The act of pieing also extends Douglas’ notion into the human sphere. Pieing leads to a fall in the status of the one defiled (white clown, guest star, audience member, etc.). In the context of the circus ring, most of these actions are properly staged, rehearsed, and consented to. Still, the act of pieing has the potential to invite us to a momentary reshuffling, a rethinking of the already given, and an openness to the unknown.
How can the continuation of the pieing motif towards a political action be categorised socially?
In my essay, I make a point that political activists using pieing to display their discontent with public figures can be considered genealogical heirs of the August Clown. Noël Godin is notorious for pieing Bill Gates when he visited European Union officials in Belgium. Another target of Noël Godin’s pieing was French politician Nicolas Sarkozy. These people suffered more than a momentary status loss, a sort of performative dethroning; through the sticky pie matter on the face, they become a clown, a figure of ridicule, irrationality, and silliness. Suddenly, as their facial features slip into the zone of ambiguity, these high-status people become vulnerable, providing a public image that contrasts with the ethos they are publicly associated with. A particular case in point is the pieing of Bernard Henri Levy, a wellknown controversial French philosopher who has criticized multi-culturalism and has stoked fear of Europe’s Islamisation. Over the past three decades, Godin and others have pied him several times. In a video, which can be found on YouTube, Levy is accompanied by cameras and reporters. Suddenly, Godin appears in the frame, pushing a pie into Levy’s face. What happens next is significant. Godin lies on the floor, and Levy threatens him with the following words:“Lève-toi vite, ou je t’écrase la gueule à coups de talon!“ (Get up fast, or I will mash your face with a heel punch!) A simple pie in the face triggered this aggressive reaction; Levy was not otherwise hurt or physically harmed. Having been pied in the face, Levy revealed another side of
himself that had, until then, been excluded from public appearance. Through the reaction, Levy transforms from a well-mannered and well-spoken philosopher into a raging person, exposing an aggressive side that has not been part of his public image. Being interviewed about the many pie-attacks he has endured over the decades, Henri Levy enlists Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher of ethics, for a statement against pieing. Henri Levy, following Levinas, suggests that the “human’s face is their most holy place.” To slap someone in the face, “even with a pie, is a para-fascist action”.6 Henry Levi refers here to the face-to-face encounter, which constitutes the basis of Levinas’s theory of ethics. The face-to-face encounter elicits a non-allergic reaction with alterity. Levinas provides us with a counterintuitive understanding of ethics. It is not because the person facing me is like me, but precisely because they are different from me, an unknowable other, that the ethical responsibility is evoked. Levinas’s notion of ethics asks how to respond, engage, and encounter alterity, difference, and otherness. Therefore, the face-to-face encounter needs to go beyond the literal interpretation. Henri Levy might ask himself how his Islamophobic attitude denies openness to alterity in France and Europe. What is holy, hence, is not necessarily the face but the relation with alterity and heterogeneity (in and beyond the face-toface encounter). It is also interesting to note that once pied, Henri Levy threatened Godin with destroying his face. I maintain that one reason Godin keeps pieing Henri Levy, is to expose the side of his personality that conflicts with his public appearance and philosophical musings about ethics. While I disagree with Henri Levy reasoning that a slap amounts to a para-fascist action, it is important to acknowledge that he evokes insights into the face’s significance in a Western context. A critique of issues around the ethics of pieing, should be considered. When does pieing evoke a critique of the established order? When does pieing evoke the possibility of encountering alterity, otherness, and difference? And when, on the other hand, is it a simple act of violence that defaces dignity rather than evoke new appearances, alternative modes of being? Answers to those questions are rather complex, situated, and multifaceted.
You create a link between pieing and the concept of the abject as introduced by Julia Kristeva. Can you explain this to us?
In general, clowns are theoretically underexplored. Judging from reactions on social media sites like Facebooks’ Circademics, clowns are elevated as inherently good. Much has to do with an understanding (somehow informed by Lecoq) that to discover one’s clown, one has to unearth one’s vulnerable and playful side. The clown, so it appears, works in service for others, leading to a greater humanity. Hence, it becomes nearly a sacrilege to consider clowns capable of dark, evil, and unethical conduct. A case in point is the outcry when former US President Trump is suggested to display clown-like qualities. When I do the work of theorising, I intend that the concepts that connect for me with clown play and figures, do not carry an immediate moral value. Rather, the ethical and political values arising from clown play and practice, are inherently context-specific. I already introduced the notion that much clown play involves disobeying and violating existing categories. Matter in the right place loses its pre-described place, becoming matter out of place. Pieing is an obvious example, but we can also think of something silly, like using a mop as hair or hat during the development of a clown character or a part of a clown play. I also take a lot of inspiration from Georges Bataille, especially his understanding of formlessness.7 Formlessness is more than that which can’t be easily categorised, which refuses itself to be pinned down. Formlessness is the base materiality of form. Paradoxically, even though form is based upon formlessness, formlessness has no value in a Western knowledge system. Both notions - Bataille’s formlessness and Douglas’s matter out of place - reverberate with each other in exciting ways. Both notions question prescribed understandings and meanings. Defying existing categories allows for polysemic relations. For example, the late Gregor Wollny explores the possibility of the inch rule by creating unexpected shapes and configurations. Clowns tap into unexplored potentialities if they transgress what is already given and expected. Lastly, I take much inspiration from Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection,
a crucial concept in Kristeva’s understanding of subject formation. She writes: “I expel myself; I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I claim to establish myself.’”8 According to Kristeva, the I transforms itself into an “I” through a process of abjection, through abnegating everything that one does not want to be part of “I.” Kristeva’s notion of abject is also provocative because what is abject is not an object – something a subject can be wholly distanced from. The abject is ever-lurking in the fringes of the subject’s identity as an “alter ego”.9 The abject keeps popping up as a reminder of what the self would prefer to deny: a heterogeneous state of being. Building on her ideas about the formation of the self, Kristeva’s vision also extends to the social and cultural level: “It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules”.10 We see how the transgressive quality of the abject resonates with formlessness and matter out of place. Indeed, Kristeva was inspired by both Bataille and Douglas when she formed her theory of abjection. For Kristeva, the abject is sublimated in the aesthetic realm, such as literature, performance, and visual arts. The performative power of many clowns consists of the fact that it allows us to confront the abject.
1 Ursić, Ante: „A Pie in the Face. Approaching Clown Politics.” In: Fuchs, Margarete / Jürgens, Anna-Sophie / Schuster, Jörg (Hg.): Manegenkünste. Zirkus als ästhetisches Modell. Bielefeld 2020.
2 Bruckman, Clyde (1927): Battle of the Century (Film). Culver City: Hal Roach Studios.
3 Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London 1966.
4 Editor’s note: In English: Pigeon hole thinking
5 Rancière, Jacques: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis 1998.
6 Liphshiz, Cnaan: „Bernard-Henri Levy targeted again by pie-wielding comedian.” In: Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 5.6.2015.
7 Bataille, Georges: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Minneapolis 1985.
8 Kristeva, Julia: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York 1982. p. 3.
9 Ibid. p. 9.
10 Ibid. p. 4.
