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

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.

     Language obfuscates into every social aspect, for not only is one no longer conscious of one’s words to convey ideas, but one thinks one expresses the ideas themselves.  Given language’s pervasive boundaries, discourse, as a form of the language technique becomes problematic.  Through time, the meaning of discourse decentralized and incorporated various conceptions; Michel Foucault uses the word to deconstruct its connotation, causing an expansion of its meaning in which one explores power dynamics.

     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.