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.  

[These and the this been marked]. The equation sex inequals gender inequals sexuality; therefore, sex inequals sexuality. [and BY front had genital breathed functIONing potato]. The master’s tool is inapplicable to a mobius strip. [merely the technicalities, the not disBELIEf, a both human for itS PEAKed projection kneepit vagina skin].

Just how sharp is the double-edged sword? [oF, AT be been, the new a been. An appeared had hair a hAIR that knee pit form silence]. The body is a vessel in which various forms of discourse explore and breathe. [exPLANation had fronds]. Discursive breathing has its categorizing qualities. [up fixedly willing and intermittent to breathing awAY Ether iF AS Thigh that buttock rubber murmured “turn Not”]. The martyr’s perpetual plight: the cost of a life for social transformation [was of at or call couldn’t the liked or was liked to aloud the tongue calm]. A difference exists between process and progress in conceptualizing the body. [leg cry thing gaze rather of this if voluntary target be that front nonintimate]. In the end, it’s the fetish that defines gender. [by to time exPERIENCE flesh upper to a vision the out insured was pART. IT’S God as of to knees belt fiddled].

(I removed all pronouns and proper nows, then on a cycle of 3, 7, 9. Circled words and then reversed the order, playing with punctuation and inserting program notes -funny how it fell together)

Dialogue occurs, but the audience cannot hear it, except for fragments in the silence.  Audio plays indistinctly with crescendos and decrescendos. Actors are on stage, remaining in clumps with one or two people breaking, exploring and changing groups.  Images flash across the bodies onto the back of the stage. At given points, the image is of a head shot with ‘odd’ expressions (the kind of expression you have when someone takes a picture and you're not aware of it) and when this happens the Actors stop their movement and a sentence or two can be heard (this sentence is one when walking down a street and approaching a group of people, you would hear a peculiar statement like "I'm fuck me horny" or "She ate it so I lost it").

Audio

Audio+pictures

Naming rounds

Sensory Overload. Entering into the structure, one is accosted by sounds, sights and smells. One finds tightly compact spaces layered with items displayed. The structure itself provides various scenarios for the body to interact in, while the structure as Farmer’s Market places the body into three distinct categories: Vendor, Consumer Musician, as documented by a pseudo-fourth category: the observers (in other words, us).

Observing provided quite a bit of questions, some of which are on the handout. We’d like to focus on the inquiry of “How does the time mechanism set a pace/direct the flow and interaction of bodies? How does time affect power between the bodies and within the structure?”

Vendors can only sell within the set hours of ten and three and the space marked for appropriate action as a vendor is designated by a bell: one ring in the morning to signify the beginning of the day and one in the afternoon to indicate the close of the day.  If anyone wishes to deviate from the bell, they must approach the staff in the office and request special permission. 

Before the bell, bodies interact in a fast pace manner using machinery, while as time approaches the bell, the bodies settle in for a more repetitive role.  Between the bell, the interaction of bodies exercise in parabolic energy. Beginning with the arrival of the vendors the energy begins to build and then subside in anticipation of the bell. Once the bell sounds, energy rises with the arrival of the consumer. As the consumer population increases so does the tension between the three classifications of bodies. The musicians add to the pace of time by designating the peek hours with their function as entertainment. The energy reaches its peak and then disintegrates on the approach of the bell. The musicians leave, the consumers begin to dwindle, and the bell rings, releasing tension. The interaction then turns to bodies and machines once again. Thus,, time is a technique, which provides the space for these functions to exist.

We analyzed the dynamics of the exchange in the farmer’s market through both a triad and a binary conception and the context in which time interacts in these theories.

As a triad, we have, as already discussed, the consumer, the vendor and the musician. The vendor causes the space to function as the farmer’s market; the musician provides the presence of the farmer’s market and lastly, the consumer uses the space. All three categories support each other and provide an interchanging flow of power.

Similarly, in a binary manner, as Foucault tends to explore, we found dichotomous tension. For example, in the physical structure versus bodily structure, it is difficult to segment the two for they relate to each other, as the setup of the place and the interaction contained within the place. At night, our focused darted outward and upward, awestruck by the vast structure; however, during business hours, our view was very much horizontal and within a five foot diameter around our bodies.  In the interior and exterior shows how the exterior of the building sets boundaries for the place, while the interior explodes nearly limitlessly (various sights, smells and sounds). If we reterm objectivity and subjectivity, objectivity implies following the rules within the structure, while subjectivity exerts as a manner in which to bend the rules while still existing within the structure.  In subjectivity, then, we enter into another dichotomy of high stakes/low stakes.  We, as observers, toyed with the idea of high stakes/low stakes, which the tension between the two is made possible in part by Judith Butler’s term of performativity, where a power structure only exerts its power by a constant reiteration of its function and it is in this repetitive notion that the power structure becomes vulnerable.  If the farmer’s market is constantly a place where bodies go to exchange, then we, as observers, broke this primary rule of exchange in a low stakes manner.  The constant rule of the farmer’s market provided us with the space for observation in more of a low stakes manner because we were able to blend with the other bodies, while remaining apart from the bodies and interacting very little with the market as a place where bodies come to exchange.  Thus, we were left with a dichotomous high stakes/low stakes question of “What is not the farmer’s market?”

     Perpetual use of a word causes assumption of its meaning. Inquiring into its meaning passes for a continuation of reading. One only knows around the word. When one pauses and attempts to define the word, momentary silence persists until a process begins which shifts from assumptions to actually looking at the word.  Discourse describes dialogue, academic analysis, fields of study, the act of conversation, speech, the use of reason and rationality, and a path for knowledge.[1]  Given its variance in meaing, Foucault shapes the word, discourse, into an inclusive, complex concept, which not only describes the term but also explores the background, the depth of its function in society.

     Foucault provides one to interact with discourse as controlled chaos, typified language, a structure, a construct in which power dynamics are expressed, along with various isolated and categorized vocabularies revolving around a central conception.  Discourse exists simultaneously as a description of language, and as a technique, which augments the body into various fields of study (particularly of the scientific realm).  The obfuscation of discourse provides the lack of awareness in how various fields use the same technique to produce a certain outcome.  It is not only a matter of what discourse does, but also of how and why it holds such a function.

     Every categorized field (philosophy, science, religion, etc.) exerts a continuum in which to perpetually captivate the body.  The fields’ expansive nature never deletes a concept, but continues cramming more and apparently different ideas onto the scene.  The effect is that “by speaking about it so much by discovering it multiplied, partitioned off and specified precisely where one had placed it, what one was seeking essentially was simply to conceal sex: a screen-discourse, a dispersion-avoidance.”[2]  Each introduction of another concept attempts to clarify, but just as with the meaning of discourse itself, it confines the subject to classification. In other words, nothing new is added, but a different explanation arises.  Foucault wades through the murky pond of discourse in the attempt to find the interrelated flow, to examine the concept of power machinations.  Along with perpetual dialogue, importance lays in what is spoken and what remains unacknowledged.

     Discourse achieves its descriptions not only through what it is, but also what it is not.  In other words, if the concept of discourse expresses typified language, it confines what remains unclassified to the outer limits of dialogue.  Discourse exists in dichotomous tension between what is applicable and inapplicable: “areas were thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and discretion…constituted a whole restrictive economy, one that was incorporated into that politics of language and speech.”[3]  The tension in the discursive field between verbal and nonverbal establishment, the acknowledged and unacknowledged, can be explored by analyzing the underlying constructs, which establish a dialogue.[4]   Foucault takes the issue of sexuality beyond the tension that establishes discourse, and examines the techniques in which knowledge-power establishes value.  Discourse, it seems, acts as the way in which power obfuscates, categorizes and establishes the body.

     Life is unimaginable without discourse; it pervades every mode of thought.   Thus, the inquiry is not what is discourse (given its existence as a power technique), but in examining its tools.  Perhaps confession is an obfuscating mechanism of discourse (just as discourse is an obfuscating tool of language), for “the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface…”[5] In the shift between confession as something that was said and then gone, into a statement which aggregates an identity, we engage in the tension between repression and expression.[6]   If confession is speaking about a concept and the opposite of confession is silence, what is the space between the two?  What is it in congruence as being a tool?

     Perhaps my obsession with confession exists in the lack of a follow-up question. Confession is discourse.  It is how we make sense of life:  a “pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches, out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it.”[7]  The concept of confession is overwhelming for its macro-technique as a form of discourse and the micro-use as the body’s identity (attaining labels).  The issue of confession is that it just is. There’s nothing more to it, although there seems to be more, but which is currently unknowable - quite typical to the discursive power, where a portion of the confessional technique exists as silence, inexpressible by language. 

     Through the concept of discourse, we find ourselves in a trap of meanings perpetuating more meaning, which Foucault slowly incorporates into a spatial environment.  Discourse is the manner in which the technique of power establishes various segmentations and classifications of power within intersecting fields, most notably the pervasiveness of the scientific realm.  Foucault uses discourse to complicate granted ideas in order to examine the space in which things come to be and augment society.