Leila Dawney
A figure is more than a representation. It is an emergent accretion of images, ideas and association that resonates within each of its iterations. At once material body, media image and cultural signifier, it is both subject and object, indeterminate container for meaning, and affective conduit. It can testify, attract, alienate, revulse and captivate. It may also feel, and weep and laugh. A specific body might be a figure (for example, Princess Diana or the First World War veteran Harry Patch), but so might a more generalized category of person (such as the figure of the soldier and the mother). Figuration is the iterative process through which particular figures are given substance and become visible, accruing meaning and political-affective force. Figures are thus understood here as humanoid effects of processes of figuration, that ‘body forth’ into the world (Castaneda 2002: 3). I have argued that the figure can thus be seen as a ‘way of thinking about the relations engendered by bodies or categories of bodies in their social and cultural specificity, and through their iterations and differential repetitions: what we might think about as encoded corporeality’ (Dawney 2013: 30). Figures are both material and semiotic: they convey meaning and have material substance and world-making effects.
The concept of the figure has diverse histories and genealogies, in literary theory, sociology, philosophy and science studies. Elias’ ‘figurational sociology’ proposed an understanding of social reality based on interdependencies and process rather than atomized individuals, emphasizing figurations as objects of analysis rather than society or individual (Elias and Jephcott 1982). The historian Erich Auerbach approaches figuration as a mimetic practice in Western literature, describing how figures ‘establish . . . a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfils the first’ (Auerbach and Said 2013: 73). Auerbach shows how the figure in literature emerges from a discursive tradition of figural realism where the story of Christ is read into Old Testament Scripture, emphasizing narratives of salvation, sacrifice and progress (Auerbach 1984; Auerbach and Said 2013). In science and technology studies, Suchman uses the term ‘configuration’ to expand the material-discursive relation of the figure beyond the human towards socio-technical assemblages (Suchman 2012).
Figurationing is a mimetic practice that maps our world, producing stories to which subjects can attach themselves, or can gain purchase on different forms of power and life. Haraway writes of figuration as a ‘contaminated practice’ which throws figures into the world, drawing on stories and associations, on allegories and material histories in the production of ideas and imaginaries (Haraway and Randolf 1997: 8). Figures, then, shape our world and understandings, providing a means through which power is given form and made material and meaningful. To study the figure and processes of figuration is not only to study the various representations of the figure, but the means by which figures travel – in art and literature, across social media, in gossip, conversations in the pub, dreams and daydreams. Drawing on these diverse genealogies of the figure, figurational critique involves understanding and unravelling the work that figures do, and/or mobilizing them in new ways. It attends to figures in two ways: as forms and embodiments of power, and as positions from which or through which to rethink power. As a methodological approach broadly allied to cultural studies, it has clear potential for moving beyond these disciplinary boundaries to shed light on formations of social, political, economic and material life.
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), is an example of the use of the figure as a form or embodiment of power. In this work, he identifies four figures of the nineteenth century that both signalled and stood for the emergence of biopolitical power: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the sexual deviant (Foucault 1978). As the ‘simultaneously material and semiotic effect of specific practices’, he suggests that such figures have a double force – as ‘constitutive effect and generative circulation’ (Foucault 1978: 3). Foucault’s figures, then, embody, materialize and reproduce biopolitical power and as such are central to its workings. More recently, Elizabeth Povinelli has posited ‘four figures of the Anthropocene’ as representing what she calls ‘geontopower’ (Povinelli 2015). As such, figures can stand for articulations of power and counter-power, providing a means of substantializing ideas as they take shape. Social movements, for example, may coalesce around particular figures – such as the miner as a figure of labour that comes to represent all workers – and figures may be invoked in the manipulation of public sentiment, for example in the scapegoating of welfare claimants and asylum seekers (Tyler 2013).
But figures are also sites of possibility and hope: the figures of the cyborg (Haraway 1991; Haraway and Randolf 1997), the stranger (Simmel 1950) and the nomad (Braidotti 1994) provide alternative positions – they open up possibilities, allowing us to think differently, and ‘construct geometric possibilities in the cracks of the matrices of domination’, providing ‘performative image[s] of the future’ (Kember 1996: 264). Thus the work that figures do can be channelled towards a politics of hope and transformation. There is also critical work to be done in inhabiting figures differently, as Haraway and Randolf suggest, referring to the problematic links between the concept of the figure and Christian redemption narratives discussed above:
[W]e inhabit and are inhabited by such figures that map universes of knowledge, practice and power. To read such maps with mixed and differential literacies and without the totality, appropriations, apocalyptic disasters, comedic resolutions, and salvation histories of secularised Christian realism is the task of the mutated modest witness.
Haraway and Randolf 1997: 11
It is one task of figurational critique, then, to make a difference: to unravel the processes of figuration that tell particular stories, and tell other stories in the process.
The figure, for Haraway, has two main facets. First, it operates as a trope: ‘figures do not have to be representational and mimetic, but they do have to be tropic; that is, they cannot be literal and self-identical. Figures must involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties’ (Haraway and Randolf 1997: 10). In other words, figures always refer outside of themselves and become a locus for cultural stories, myths, sentiments and hopes. Haraway’s entities – cyborg, primate, oncomouse, are figurations ‘involved in a kind of narrative interpellation into ways of living in the world’ (Haraway and Randolf 1997: 140). Haraway describes such figures as ‘performative images that can be inhabited’, drawing on an understanding of contemporary forms and logics of life as an ‘implosion of bodies, texts and property’ (Haraway and Randolf 1997: 7–11).
Thinking about figures, and practices of figuration, involves dealing with images and texts from a materialist perspective. It involves recognizing that these images and texts are more than representations: they have material substance and effects, and participate in material worlds through which sense and meaning are produced. In my own work on the figure of Harry Patch, the last First World War veteran in the United Kingdom, I argued that Patch operated as a figure of a form of experiential authority through his material embodiment: his frailty and working-class masculinity, and his experience of pain and suffering. His figuration across media and in public imaginations could not be understood in terms of an analysis of one broadcast or one image. Figurational critique involves an understanding of the affective and material impact that these constellations of images, broadcasts and iterations in the public sphere and in individual worlds have.
How might we approach the work that figures do, and think about how they circulate and participate in the production of the social? Innovative theoretical-methodological practices are needed that bridge the space between body, text and world where this work happens. Castaneda, in her work on the figure of the child, adopts a figurative method in order to ‘describe in some detail the constellation of practices, materialities, and knowledges through which a particular figuration occurs, and in turn, to identify the significance of that figuration for making wider cultural claims’ (Castaneda 2002: 8). As I argue elsewhere, invoking the ‘figure’ makes possible, a ‘way of conceptualizing the affective capacities that are held by figures that are both material and symbolic, that are produced by and produce the social’ (Dawney 2013: 43). Like Foucauldian genealogy, figurative methods track figures across and through their figuration; across media forms and other forms of representation; and through everyday practices. They pay attention to the material-semiotic apparatuses of which they are part, and in which they participate.
Like genealogy, figuration is interested in differences and displacements; in the movement of figures in an economy of truth production; in their indeterminacy and in the power that such indeterminacy wields. Figurative methods need to draw attention to how figures participate in the making of worlds, tracing their various articulations but also the archetypes and cultural narratives that they draw into their storytelling. However, a genealogical analysis of sites of figuration alone does not necessarily help us understand the mechanisms through which figures work through bodies: what gives them grip, and captivates people. Figures operate, in part, through their encounters with bodies, and their operation is dependent on those bodies’ material histories of association and experience: their inscription as subjects. It is for this reason, then, that we need to consider encounters between bodies and figures: what fears and fascinations do they rub against? What histories and material traces of those histories participate in the encounter? We need to sit alongside such figures, allow them to do their work, to play upon and bring to the surface the cultural myths, the fears, hopes, desires and negations that they call into being in their tropic resonances. In other words, figurational critiquing asks us to manifest the spectres that haunt and lurk behind the figure. Castaneda’s work pushes at these questions in her discussion of how the mythological ghost of ‘La Llorena’ (the weeping woman) in Hispanic America draws on fears about the selling of Guatemalan children to wealthy childless couples from the USA. The power of the figure lies in its ability to establish such connections on the level of affect: to tap into the histories of subjectivation that emerge in bodies in their encounters with texts.
If we understand figures as a locus for affective forces that coalesce around them, perhaps we can see more clearly how they might grip or captivate, or inspire us to disgust or to hate. In being captivated ourselves, we can follow the lines of association to the material and historical conditions that make it possible for our bodies to respond to these figures in such ways. We can investigate the traces of history and experience in our own bodies that they rub up against: the desires, anxieties, material insecurities and existential fears that are already in process that are triggered through these figurings in a way that both augments what is there already and contributes to the ongoing formation of the subject and, by association, the social. This involves attention to the affective register of bodies, through which these relations take hold and the extent to which these figures augment and intensify affective resonances in bodies. A discussion of the circulation of stories and images is thus supplemented with thinking about how they work in and through affective bodies and the political effects of such circulation. If we are to follow this methodological challenge through, we need to develop tools for reading figures not only through texts but also through the affective micropolitics of daily life: for thinking about moving train carriages to avoid someone who looks like a ‘terrorist’, a smile at a pregnant woman, weeping while watching Mo Farah winning a gold medal in the 2012 Olympics, or the authority of Malala Yousafzai. Figures not involve only the tropic association of texts and representations, but are chains of constellations of images and associations and memories that gain meaning in their affective encounters with bodies, held together by repetition, association and the memory of the effect of related images and ideas.
Figurational critique, then, needs to involve sitting with the figure: allowing ourselves to be taken along with the figure, letting it do its work and affect us, opening ourselves up to its various referrals and deferrals, associations and dissociations, attachments and alienations. It involves an unravelling, but also a remaking, a retelling of figural stories.
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Auerbach, E. and Said, E. W. (2013). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Castaneda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Dawney, L. (2013). The figure of authority: the affective biopolitics of the mother and the dying man. Journal of Political Power, 6(1): 29–47.
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