Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

We are institutionalized to “know thyself” in which we form our lives chasing after ourselves.  Identity relates to the concept that a body can be segmented and known. Through the ascription of a label, we demarcate and produce the “other” who are unlike ourselves. It is in the individual sense that we compare and contrast, find our functions in society licit or illicit and thus justify our beings.  For my winter quarter project, I want to examine identity, to expose and explore the body strapped down by various categories.  I am not looking to make a succinct statement about identity but to problematize labels through blending techniques.  My challenge is to establish a space, which extensively looks at the concept from various angles.  The product of this inquiry will materialize as the ‘body on tape’.  The notion of a taped body highlights the concept of identity as a boundary of the body, identity taping down the body (holding it in place), and sealing the body as an idea. I plan to mess with (and blend) various forms, particularly through playing with points of view.  By using the style of experimental critical writing, I want to keep with the motif and not be limited by the alphabet, but use ‘sound’ language as well.  Not only through the use of sound will I break the flow of the writing, but also through playing with the space in and outside the distinction between narrative and expository writing.  Jenny and I plan to work closely and interact with each other’s manifestations, as we are both interested in this concept of identity.

        The idea for this project springboards from Scott Turner Schofield’s workshop.  He posited the sex/gender/sexuality inequation and questioned whether our use of labels along with the subsequent reinterpretation and coining of new labels was actually viable.  For the most part, we unconsciously conceive of and strap our bodies down to exemplify these labels, which we either internalize or ascribe to ourselves.  In this case, labels are normative for we cannot conceive of a world outside identity politics.  Moreover, we only have the notion of identity because we engage in and establish a certain form of discourse, which produces the individual commodity.  By exploring via the medium of experimental critical writing, it becomes possible to shift the language of identity politics. 

In Clinic, when we read Tomorrow’s Eve, we interacted with the notion that it helped to look at the use of phonographs throughout the novel as a record of the body.   We talked about how recording the voice dematerializes the body, and how a recorded voice also cites the body.  Voice as sound, then, is problematized within my project because it not only engages with semantics but also through sound without words.  The hope in the project is to step away from sound as a construction of normalization and to embark through the performative networks of power, which establish the notion of identity through creative experimentation.  

 In structuring next quarter, the idea is to take two major texts (Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge along with Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself) and allow it to sink in through the weeks.  I think what these two texts will point to within their statements is the discourse that produces and maintains the identity technique.  By supplementing these two texts with other forms of production (poems, prose, articles, sound pieces, journal reviews), it will become possible to posit small shifts in the identity concept.  The plan is to look at a production of Oliver Hermann’s Eine Nacht, Ein Leben that uses Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, as well as read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Donna Haraway, Barthes, and scholarly reviews.  In using various mediums, the goal is to establish the space where the tape of the body becomes indistinguishable.

The hope for the audience is that the ‘body on tape’ will draw them into the world of identity through tape and then starkly remind them of their surroundings.  The manner in which this will arise, will be one from which alienation is examined by and through gauged laughter.