The Tragedy of Heroic Tradition
The classical hero distinguishes himself from the world. He stands above it, overcomes obstacles, defeats enemies, and bends history to his will through decisive action and autonomy. His greatness is measured by his exceptionalism. Contemporary female heroes inherit this very same structure. Figures such as G.I. Jane, Sarah Connor, Ripley and Furiosa negotiate, each in different ways, a position historically reserved for men. Their heroism still depends upon a mirror image of discipline, strength, resilience and endurance. Once they successfully embody this, they are celebrated. The question, therefore, is not whether women can become heroes, but whether heroism itself demands another imagination. Perhaps the tragedy does not lie in the historical exclusion of women from the heroic tradition, but in the heroic tradition itself.
The Greek tragic hero forgets his own measure through excess. In his greatness, he forgets only one thing: the fact that he can die. His downfall is the consequence of denying it. Today, this figure has become strangely contemporary. I think current times are the greatest expression of this delusion of grandeur: the delusion of a civilisation convinced that everything can be measured, engineered, controlled, optimised and accelerated; one that refuses to concern itself with the finitude of its own existence, seeking instead constant distraction through spectacle, productivity, social media, entertainment, endless travels to ‘see the world’. What is this, if not the denial of a limit that has long since already been reached? And within this world I constantly find myself confronted by the question (while skipping over countless others for the sake of it): how am I to be myself within this condition of existence? My fundamental question is: how am I to be myself, here and now? It is within that ‘being here and now’ that I search for meaning through making and doing my work. And it is through my most recent work that I search for another mirror image of the hero.
What kind of hero becomes imaginable once catastrophe itself proves to be the point of departure? Another hero begins to emerge from my imagination. For a brief moment, I call her the heroine, not because she is a woman (whatever that means), but because the feminine has historically been excluded from the heroic narrative, and therefore, she seems to me a necessary figure to gnaw away at, undermine and dismantle the established heroic framework from within. In truth, however, this figure is not the female version of Achilles. His model of heroism simply no longer functions within an ecologically entangled world in which everything depends upon everything else. Therefore, she comes to signify his end. Ultimately what is at stake here, is the dismantling of the category of the hero as it has been constructed within the Western tradition, although this is not in itself her end game. She is about to do something radically different (more on that later).
What defines her is her acknowledgement of her entanglement with the world. Rather than towering above it, she remains connected to the world by an umbilical cord. By these means, she is ‘in’ and ‘of’ it. The world she inhabits is a post-apocalyptic battlefield in which every battle has already been fought. She has nothing to add to this stage, nor does she remain under the illusion that anything still can or should be added. She is not nature’s saviour, nor is nature the backdrop against which she appears. Foreground and background continuously exchange places until the distinction itself begins to dissolve. This hero does not stand before the landscape in which she exists; she is absorbed into it. She is landscape, organism, body, plant, machine and human all at once. And yet, her singularity arises through her relationship with the world because the world itself grants it to her. She becomes herself through ecological entanglement.
She carries no weapons. If she does take things into her hands, they become at once prosthesis, ornament, bodily extension, sculpture, plant, parasite, growth and threat. These protrusions expose not the power of the phallus, but its instability. What has traditionally functioned as a symbol of domination now begins to mutate. The poses she adopts, turn what we understand as power into choreography, repetition, performance, quotation and citation. Her body merely rehearses heroism: it just harmlessly performs it, tests it, imitates it. It becomes faintly ridiculous. She is sincerity and parody at once: convincing and laughable, heroic and unstable. This way, gender too, becomes visible as something continuously staged and repeated. Even in her full glory, this hero remains precarious. She refuses to become yet another ideal, replacing the monument she herself has just thrown over.
My hero appropriates her own existence. She is not entirely human, not entirely plant and not entirely machine. She inhabits a damaged world without attempting to restoring any boundaries. She wanders endlessly across the scorched plain of whatever remains of this planet. She does not save the world (if indeed this would be possible), she is just simply entangled in catastrophe. On top of that, the distinction between them has dissolved. She is not a new archetype, but opens up the possibility that the hero itself belongs to an extinct species. Isn’t it tragic that the hero who set out to save the world, never paused to ask whether he himself could be saved, and that long before catastrophe arrived, he had become part of it?
Sometimes a thought (it’s just a thought, only a thought) requires a figure to take shape, one that disappears into camouflage at the end of all ends.