Thinking about what sort of bodies are abject...

"Lakshmi before surgery to remove her 'parasitic twin' that stopped developing in the womb. A two-year-old Indian girl, born with four arms and four legs, is making a good recovery after a 27-hour operation last week. Doctors say her condition is stable and will decide later this week whether to move her from the intensive care unit."

It's also interesting that this girl had eight limbs, like some Hindu gods. While this may seem like a disability that would cause this girl a lot of hardship in her life, I wonder if she is treated with more dignity because her culture is more familiar with images of multiple limbs. I wonder if anyone thought she could be an incarnation of Lakshmi- while this little girl might really benefit from becoming "normal," and who am I to say she shouldn't get that chance, it's worth thinking about how she might have been thought of in a time before advanced surgery could transform her. It's kind of eugenic- and reminds me of sex-assignment surgery of intersex infants- isn't it worth asking -"what's wrong with being this way?"

Looking up the name Lakshmi on wikipedia, I found that it the name of a Hindu goddess:

Physically, goddess Lakshmi is described as a fair lady, with four arms, seated on a lotus, dressed in fine garments and precious jewels. Her expression is always calm and loving. The most striking feature of the iconography of Lakshmi is her persistent association with the lotus. The meaning of the lotus in relation to Shri-Lakshmi refers to purity and spiritual power. Rooted in the mud but blossoming above the water, completely uncontaminated by the mud, the lotus represents spiritual perfection and authority.

Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, love and beauty, the lotus flower and fertility. Representations of Lakshmi (or Shri) are found in Jain and Buddhist monuments, in addition to Hindu temples. Analogous to the Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus - who also originated from the oceans - she is generally thought of as the personification of material fortune, beauty and prosperity.

"The Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden: A Rhetorical Analysis and Hermeneutic Interpretation"

Forum: Qualitative Social Research

http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-02/3-02cronick-e.htm#g562

 One of my favorite parts of Masculin/Feminin is the fake survey questions that Jean-Pierre asks throughout, combined with actual real-time interviews about love, love-making, and politics. This reminded me of the survey questions we came up with in class, and the discussion of the form of the form. Apparently, these are the questions that Goddard wants to ask “the children of Marx and CocaCola.” The questions are personal, political, sexual, philosophical, literary, and sometimes nonsensical. The film’s characters are in the condition of being young, curious about sex, and caught between communism and capitalism, revolutionary ideals and teen pop. Godard’s thoughts on the over-the-top masculinity and femininity of American Hollywood gender roles is seen in a film-within-a-film parody.

In My Life to Life, the main character is down on her luck and seems to not want to run back to the shelter of a man who bores her but loves her. Even though she has a job at a record store, she cannot pay rent, and becomes a prostitute. The film is a critique of liberal humanist idea of being responsible for all your own actions and things that happen to you. Even though her philosophy is that she is responsible for her own life, even the smallest things show that she has no control over her life at all actually. Eventually she is shot when she is being traded for money against her will- she has become a sex slave and is unable to get out of the system she thought was about supply and demand, with her in some degree of control over events, who she sleeps with, and how much she makes. It’s all a fascade. I don’t think Goddard is suggesting that we have no agency over our lives, but is instead showing how we can become trapped in a mindset, a mode of discourse that then actually does entrap us materially. (Before she becomes a prostitute, a prostitute friend tells her that she should leave and go to the tropics, which she thinks is totally ridiculous. It seems less ridiculous than becoming a sex slave.) There is so much more to say about this movie, but one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is because of the theme of prostitution in our readings this quarter.

“Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy” Orion, October

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/460

(Trying to stay rooted in materiality and material applications of theory, I’ve been reading magazines and articles in Orion, The Nation, Democracy Now, Ms. And Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, a newly released book by John Berger.)

 This article is about a bioremediation art project in a Pennsylvania town, left to rot in abject poverty and poisoned land by the coal industry that employed it for a century. Until this past year or so, there was no longer any town government, no parks, few jobs, and acid drainage poured from abandoned mine into the local water source. With the help of a few very dedicated designers, engineers, artists, and state employees, a hybrid bioremediation art project/ sculpture, of unprecedented scale, born of progressive social theory and conceptual art, was hatched and raised up over 10 years in the community. With tractors and backhoes as sculptural tools, this site was reshaped into a bicycle greenway (Ghost Town Rail Trail, which today attracts seventy-five thousand bicyclists a year), with limestone water filtration instead of toxic lime neutralization, and 1000 trees that are a sort of “’litmus garden,’ where the fall color of the trees would reflect the color of the acidic water as it turned from a reddish-orange, to yellow, to silver green.” Near the six key-stone shaped ponds, there is “a mosaic that illustrates what these thirty-five acres looked like at the height of the coal boom. The nine-by-fifteen-foot mosaic is modeled on a 1928 Sanborn Insurance map. It depicts with a line of brown and black tiles the coke ovens whose foundations are still visible in the wetland area beyond the mosaic.”

 Reading this article with Foucault’s ideas of power-knowledge-discourse in mind, I think this example of resistance is the kind of thing he would like. The project is based on principles of interdisciplinary work in the service of the community’s own aspirations to fix their environment: “Art as an experience in place and time, effectively transforming people’s lives.” Thinking about discourse: Foucault is interested in the specifics- the most local and tactical experience of force-relations. How does discourse get made in this town? A history of being beaten down, without much to hope limited their conceptions of what was possible for them. As they were listened to and asked what they wanted for their community, they had to “bump up against their own preconceptions about themselves and about the community.” This was a land where even during the days of coal when there were jobs, people starved to death- people's babies starved to death. “This was an area of bloody union wars in the 1930's- “If you were civically engaged in a coal camp, “ noted Comp, “you were likely to get fired, blacklisted, and be homeless.” So the tendency to keep one’s mouth shut, to grudgingly accept terms set by others, became part of the Appalachian character.”

 This community hybrid science/art project shows how discourse can be interrupted and altered at the most local level, even when it seems that control over bodies, production, and knowledge is nearly complete and seamlessly integrated into the lived experience of generations. This resistance is model of diffused power, grassroots style that shows how much can change when knowledge and power are shared by those who have it- not in tired tropes of tithing and community service, but in radical new concepts born of dialogue and listening. (What the Highlander Center calls “participatory education.”) This means reconceptualizing Art- a transformation from “art for art’s sake” to “art has a job to do.”

 “To understand the world as a canvas is to think very differently about its composition and one’s place within that composition.” Science and art often speak entirely different languages, with the importance of both being lost in translation. It is especially important to bridge this gap in higher education, where the next generation of individuals with power and knowledge to share are being trained.

 On a personal note, being from Appalachia, the trials of the people of this area are important to me.  A big part of my life plan is to go to Graduate school to study bioremediation to help this area- so I found this article particularly valuable.

Gestus/ "Manwatching"

I found this clip in 1976 edition of Playboy magazine. My housemate Jeremiah bought a whole box of old girly mags from a yardsale for $10 and they've taken up residence in our kitchen. This entire room, consequently as become plastered with collages we make together, mostly cutting out and messing with bizarre advertisements selling super-sexualized gendered identities and lots of centerfold women's statements like "I'm not a feminist. I like a big strong man to light my cigarettes." I've spent a lot of time this quarter leafing through these magazines and thinking about the discourse they circulate, and the construction of women as sex objects and men as subjects. Surprisingly the Playboys from the late 60's have a lot of great articles about police brutality, arguments against the Vietnam war, interviews with radical artists like Dylan who cry out against labeling and objectifying (as someone who resists fixed identity)- but the magazine’s treatment of the issue of women's liberation and feminism are reactionary. I could go into a lot more analysis about the difference between Playboy and Hustler's  depiction of bodies and bodily functions- a short explanation is that Hustler seems not to be preoccupied with maintaining social boundaries as regards to the body and bodily control. It goes straight for the shock value of not only talking about, but graphically depicting male and female genitalia, naked women eating shit (I'm serious), and advocating for violent action against feminists and feminist scholars. Dispensing with what Mauss calls polite "social ideosynchracies," Hustler is perhaps in some way excising social worries; concerns that the body will rebel and resist "retarding mechanisms" that inhibit disorderly movements. “…bodily control is an expression of social control - abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds to the requirements of a social experience which his being expressed.”

 Looking critically at “men’s magazines” of the late 60’s and 70’s is an interesting way of thinking about the convergences of social discourses. These magazines are printed while also in the midst of American imperialism, women’s liberation movement, race-riots, and the student anti-war movement, and as such can be a way of studying contemporary culture by stepping out it a bit, and into part of the discourse that shaped it, to see what they were saying about these issues. The fact that it is a magazine of naked women, marketed towards well-off heterosexual white men (the advertisements say so) is all the better. After all, Douglas says: “The human body is always treated as an image of society and…there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension. Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions.” (Douglas 79) The woman’s body is photographed and placed firmly against this grid of militaristic, capitalistic power. A society confused about what sort of economic and political strategies are right for people, where cultural and political changes are constant, finds its security in the familiar oppression of the woman’s body, using the ruse of female sexual freedom as a means to preoccupy themselves with her entrances and exits. My analysis is not intended to sound like I’m advocating censorship. I don’t think pornography is bad, and knowing that things are usually not what they seem and power censors things it doesn’t like, I don’t think censorship is usually wise. Especially because these magazines can be used as cultural artifacts that tell us much about societal anxieties and mechanisms used to control bodies then and now.

One more thought on these mags: I never really spent any time reading Playboy before. In highschool I flipped through a modern Hustler and was really upset by it. These old magazines are so different from their modern issues. They are pre-airbrushing and Photoshop. It’s the last time women’s bodies were seen as real, even if they were objectified.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"It is thanks to society that there is the certainty of pre-prepared movements, domination of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness."Mauss

 Natural symbols will not be found in individual lexical items. the physical body can have universal meaning only as a system which resonds to the social system, expressing it as a system....Natural symbols can express the relation of an indicidual to his society at that general systemic level." Mary Douglas

 Manwatching is a book by Desmond Morris in which he has "itemized human behavior into several thousand separate gestures and expressions." I wonder if Brecht would have loved or hated this book. Supposedly, the author makes the clear warning that the book is not meant to be used as an aid in mind-reading or to "dominate one's companions." That, Brecht would agree with. But, the seemingly reductionist methodology is potentially unpallatable.

 These images are not innocuous observations- they must be considered in the context of eugenics, race, class, and gender. I wonder what methods Morris used to get these expressions. They might be drawings, but I bet they come from photographs-, which places them squarely in the context of what Eadweard Muybridge did with breaking up motion into segments. Thinking of an expression as just one still image refers directly to this era of science and thinking. One can't forget the pseudo-scientific methods used in the past to catalogue human faces, such as Petrus Camper's facial gonimeter, which measured facial angles of heads and skills to determine the subject's supposed quality of intelligence and ability. This catalogue of facial expressions begins to seem much more like the French National Identification Bureau's chart indexing different types of facial parts with which to convict lawbreakers, and create "criminals." And why all this emphasis on the face being the primary vehicle of expression? Perhaps the book includes more than just the face, but the magazine didn't mention them. This type of cataloging cannot be seen as something cute or amusing, which the magazine's reporter apparently feels it is- "possibly the best coffee table book of the decade."

 "Manwatching" is supposed to mean "human watching." And humans do not all look or act like this Anglo dude who has created some sort of pseudo-scientific text by observing what look like his golf buddies. Some of the faces seem eerily similar to the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne's photographic documentation of electrically induced expressions. In lecture, Julia mentioned how these images, in their captured and printed form, (in Manwatching they are drawn) become fixed artifacts, which, like words in language, designate the range of things that can be said about something.

 Are there really only a certain specified number of ways to move and express emotion and intent? Maybe in this culture- but this approach is typically Euro-centric. At some point I learned that the Japanese have hundreds of infinitesimally different movements of the hand/kimono sleeve, indicating different expressions, meanings, and intentions. I don't know if this is part of dance or geisha culture or what, but regardless, it proves that each culture has a different set of gestural meanings, just as they have words for ideas and experiences that do not exist in other languages.

What is the face of "everyman?" Well it appears to be a male. All the faces printed in the magazine (I'm not sure about the actual book) are of the same man's face, who, with his thin nose and lips is presumably white. This reminds me of Elizabeth Grosz's essay Cities-Bodies in which she talks about the metaphor/metonymy of the body of the State as being presumably male (with male genitalia.)

But there is some merit in looking at gestures and expressions, particularly in a linguistic sense. After all, Foucault wrote about Deep Grammar- the docile surface of the human body marked by power-knowledge. Like we were thinking about while watching Pumping Iron II, "What are techniques of power which produce effects on concepts and grammar of body language? " These faces are not "natural," and the scientific cataloguing of them is not done in a vacuum. Our gestures and expressions are a product of the cultures and experiences in which we develop.

On gestus-  The faces by themselves are gestures, which Brecht might want an actor to wear, like a mask, but the assumption of "Manwatching, "that these faces can be like reading straight into the mind of the actor this is really the opposite of Brecht's idea of gesture/gestus, which was designed to show something without the actor trying to realistically represent it. I am intrigued with the idea of seeing these faces as "signs," which, like Brecht, I might turn on itself. I want to make a stencil of a particular face that stands out to me- a dualistic clownish kind of face with a raised eyebrow and closed eye. That's a start.

The form: I'm thinking how the faces, being drawn and simplified, are in a way masks. I'm wondering what the role of masks play in different cultures, and what sort of expressions they recognize and why... Also, the fact that they are drawn makes them a much softer, less eugenic-looking presentation- less stark, the connotations and acceptance of "art."

The term “Social Media,” as explained by The Economist in an article about Facebook, encompasses web applications that allows individuals to create their own pages- filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another.

Facebook: I’ll give some examples of where this social tool is leading, and present some ways for thinking about what kinds of environments these communities can be understood as being, and how the bodies which interact in them shape and are shaped by that environment. This will both parallel and contextualize Second Life, which Ella and Devin will talk about.

Facebook/MySpace/Second Life

“Facebook describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” It is a website directory, online community, social calender, and virtual bulletin board.Each individual has their own profile/id page, on which they select their chosen identity from given choices, and pontificate on their likes, dislikes, favorite books, movies, music, and update a one-line entries about their current state. The user can join groups of others interested in similar things, start a group to meet people with a specific common interest, post photos, videos, and music, play games, and share information with others. The profile/id page has your picture(s), sex, age (birthday), hometown, year of graduation from what college, political and religious views, what gender you are interested in dating, your current relationship status, what sort of interactions you’re looking for with others, education history, and personal interests like favorite activites, music, favorite tv shows, and so on… there is also and an ever-expanding array of what are called “applications” created by anyone (much like how anyone can create products for sale and use in the Second Life world.) A large number of them that I saw are about keeping up with sports teams, finding out what people think of you, flirting, sending virtual hugs, smiles and gifts, while others expand the identification constraints- such as one which addresses gender in particular- creating options both binary and non-binary, for sex, transition status, gender identity, gender presentation, orientation, interested in, title, and pronoun, Another of interest is the Facebook Addicts, which is a satirical quiz for those who feel that they no longer know a world outside Facebook, a potentially logical question when Internet Addiction Disorder, which renders a person incapable of taking care of their material body, is diagnosed in 2% of the world’s population.

Some Stats: There are around 40 million members of Facebook. It is the #1 most accessed site for 18-24 year olds. 60% log on daily, and the average user logs on 6 times per day. 100 million in revenues this year. (The Economist “Book Value; Face Value” Jul 21 2007)

Zuckerberg, the 20 year old creator of Facebook describes it as a “social graph”, a model of nodes and links in which nodes are people and connections are friendships, becoming a powerful mechanism for spreading information” It is specifically a map charting “real and pre-existing connections,” as opposed to the MySpace model where most people don’t actually know each other. (“U.S. News and World Report, Staying True to themselves; Student Facebook profiles, it turns out, match the real thing” Jul 16 2007). Students initially used it as a way to get to know other students in their school or classes before taking courses with them or meeting them at parties. ("One Teenager's Advice To Adults on How to Avoid Being Creepy on Facebook" Computers in Libraries Sep 2007)

Micro-Macro Identities of Social Networks

Identities and cultures of communities differ- There is a macro and microcosm of identity: there is the identity of these social communities as a whole, which is composed of and reflected by the individual identities of their members.

An academic researcher referenced in the Economist argues that Facebook is for “good kids,” It was created by a student of the most prestigious academic institutions in the U.S., was only available at other prestigious Ivy Leage universities, then other colleges, and since last September is open to everyone. While MySpace, originally designed as a self-marketing tool for musicians, is for blue-collar kids, “art fags” “goths” and “gangstas.” (The Economist)

What is this evolving into?

With Facebook, the identification card has merged with the yearbook page, and acts as our avatar in this online community. It has caught up with who we are moment by moment- what we are thinking, how we are feeling, and what aspects of the social media we choose to affiliate with and respond to, intimately affected by and affecting discourse in the network.

With the internet and online communities so new, it makes sense to question what form it is taking and what effects it has on us. How do we envision social-interactions in a virtual world of chaotic interactivity? There is enormous potential for this sort of Profile/id page to affect the way we interact with the web, which is why not only college students are interested in it. These online communities with the personal identification page, double as internet user interfaces, and for the first time is seen as having that potential use in the next advances of email, photo and video sharing- because of Facebook’s enforced limits and aesthetic rigor that are lacking in other online communities like MySpace. It could ultimately act to sort and streamline the endless carvinal of information into aesthetically sleek, clutter-free projections of our identity online, (the Google of people), the ipod of internet identity.

Instead of subjecting us to unlimited venture capitalism, these communities will perhaps be a place where the discourse of knowledge/information is created/reflected and spread through the next step in advances of email, instant messaging applications, universal search, photo and video sharing.

So, if online communities are here to stay, and what we see now is a sort of prototype for what is to come- what does it mean that we are interacting with others as nothing more than an incidental moment in the transmission of code and information,” to quote Paul Gilroy. What do we make of our disembodiment? How does this form of imaging the human body“ represent or violate [it] in its symmetrical, intersubjective, social humanity, in its species being, in its fragile relationship to other fragile bodies…?”(Gilroy 255)

Is the construction of online identity, with all its emphasis on labeling and categorizing somehow different than the construction by which bodies were made meaningful by what Paul Gilroy called “indexing the estrangement from the authentic human body … as color-coded?” Are we carrying glorified Bertillon cards, taking our own mugshots?
It would be wise to look within this new social media for the purpose and techniques of the “dismal order of power and differentiation.” (Gilroy)

Cities-Bodies: What is the construction of the new city and the body of its new cyber-subjects/citizens?

Considering the size of online social communities, we can see them as virtual mega-cities, where inhabitants dwell and navigate around an invisible, ever shifting substrate of social networks, where discourses are circulated, and the individual is an avatar or a facebook/myspace page.

Elizabeth Grosz, in her essay “Space, Time, and Perversion” is a useful tool for thinking about how these bodies and communities/cities are being fashioned so that we might better understand the relations of power, knowledge, discourse, in this not-so metaphoric web. Speaking of real cities, she says that they are "the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power" and “by now the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts- the place where the body is representationally re-explored, transformed, contested, re-inscribed. In turn, the body (as cultural product) transforms, re-inscribes the urban landscape according to its changing (demographic) needs. (Grosz 108)

Also, she asserts that bodies are not culturally pregiven, and there is no natural or perfect environment for the body, so the environments we create cannot alienate them- A reminder to avoid concepts of natural/unnatural.

“There is not a mirroring of nature in artiface, rather a two-way linkage that could be defined as an interface." Of the interface with the computer, she says it will fundamentally transform the ways in which we conceive both of cities and bodies and their interrelations.

One way this is ocurring is that these cybersocieties/cities are incredibly panopticonic- any actions we perform on our pages, writing on other people’s pages, is immediately able to be noticed by a feed to other’s main page, tracking our actions. But then again, this is a trend in the material world as well, as a popular phenomena of people tracking their friends on cell phones.

Some Questions:

As social media becomes more commonplace, what does it mean to be virtually friended by authority figures, your boss or your professor? What stays out of discourse, what is considered private and public?

What kind of culture will these cities foster? How does this virtual world also affect the material world? We are asking a lot of the same questions about virtual worlds as the anti-theatre people in Elizabethan England- does playing at something in imagination make you want to do it in real life?

As human bodies are hooked up to online communities in whatever form, at earlier ages we recognize we are in the midst of a giant social experiment- how does a dependence on virtual human interactions affect social intelligence, capacity for trust, recognition of emotional cues?

How do bonds made with people only known in the imagination affect or replace real relationships? 40% of social community users feel that their online friends are every bit as important to them as their real-life ones. (Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future at USC)


Health, Healing, and Law Enforcement

News reporters and law enforcement are using MySpace as a research tool for stories where they need background on an individual, an example being using it as a resource to determine which gangs control what turf, and what shootings may be based on. This kind of information is not always factual. The real and the unreal is becoming increasingly more complicated. Cyberphycologists use social communities in the form of the Internet game with avatar, to treat Iraq veterans with PTSD or help people to get over phobias- asserting that these environments can be so real that they can modify behavior. (U.S. News and World Report “Alone in A Parallel Life” May 21 2007)


Looking at social media and its potential, we can see our evolving cyborg consciousness as something intimately connected with our real, material bodies, affecting and influencing the methods of socializing in communities.

I found this piece in this month's (Nov) Ms. magazine:

The Aphrodite Project, created and run by Norene Leddy, a Fulbright fellow, is about empowering women who do sex work, making it a safer profession. She has designed "high-heeled platform sandals with a small screen for digital images and speakers for sound, as well as an alarm and built-in GPS. The sex worker can set a timer when she feels unsafe, and if the alarm isn't deactivated by its set time the shoes will emit a high-pitched sound, while the silent GPS receiver alerts either law enforcement or sex-workers advocacy groups such as PONY in New York and Coyote in Los Angeles. Wearers can also access an online community with health resources, client email lists and a blog where they can list "problem clients."

In another article I found some statistics to put the need for such a prosthetic in context:

In a 2001 study of sex workers, 69% said they'd been isolated, confined, and/or restrained by pimps

50% suffered daily abuse or near-daily abuse

 http://www.theaphroditeproject.tv/

One specific article that I want to share a few ideas from is called "Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture" by Brenda Brasher. This text talks about Frankenstein, Metropolis, Roland Barthes on Einstein as cyborg (though he didn't use the term), U.S. techno-celebratory popular culture's affects on the future of religious symbolism and continued existence, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Marx and more.

On the origin of the world cyborg:

"How has life managed to imitate art in this way? The cyborg's bridge across the fictional/real divide that enabled it to be replicated as both fiction and fact, and the study of its character to be approached both as mythology and anthropology have a fascinating history. Intriguingly, although the cyborg concept initially developed in the arts [the aesthetic idea], the term cyborg originated in the sciences. Its first appearance was in 1960 in a speculative article on the future of space travel authored by two research scientists (Clynes and Kline). Rather than developing human-friendly environments to travel through space, Clynes and Kline made the unorthodox proposal that scientists try to alter the human body so it could thrive in space. They reffered to these space-adapted humans as "cyborgs." In the sciences the term stuck. As advances in medical technologies enabled medical specialists to replace certain defective or deficient human organs and limbs with artificial or animal implants, the specialists involved referred to implant recipients as cyborgs."

This piece also discusses the ideas of Naomi Goldenberg, whose addition to the cyborg discourse is much less celebratory than Haraway's Manifesto:

"Contra Haraway,Goldenberg decried the englarging role of machines in human socialization. The philosophical and religoius heritage of the West... leaves Westerners predisposed to form harmful attitudes toward the tecnologies overtaking their lives. This heritage has taught us 'that human life is a rough copy of something out there- something better, wiser and purer...' Consequently, Westerners possess a cultural proclivity to respond to machines not as tools to use but as role models to emulate. As people act upon this proclivity, the isolation and loneliness of modern life are being increased. Given the pro-technology direction of Western development, Goldenberg's prediction for the future is a somber one: 'We are, I think, engaged in a process of making one another disapear by living more and more of our lives apart from other humans, in the company of machines."

Brasher engages with this dialectic, reconciling the two ideas somewhat, with the idea that cyborg artist-technicians, like religious movements of the past, will encourage/mandate the capitalist marketplace be ethical issues of privacy, public policy, etc become more intertwined with our cyborg selves. The piece ends with a question:

"Will consciously claiming the cyborg metaphor as an intentionally-bodied self foster the formation of the micro- and macro-political efforts necessary to restrain and direct techno-capitalism to address the common good, or will it instead work to undermine them? Here, the religious function of popular culture may play a pivoal role. Because of their profound intimacy with technology, those who produce the artifacts of mass-mediated culture are among those most keenly cognizant of technology's many pitfalls....they might generate sufficient symbolic cyber-manna to nourish the development of a moral consensus on technological ethics."

 Some other good essays are "Tiptree and Haraway: The Reinvention of Nature"by Judith Genova and "The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts" by Lesley Sharp- an anthropological perspective of scientific discourse about the body

These parts, so smooth, so round, so fast, so gripping- they fit together.

These parts- designed by a master mind.

A new time, a body's movements and gestures measured in degrees of versimilitude- adherance to the clock.

The body still (in pieces) holds its own timepiece- the key to her mechanization.

Look sharp! Sit up straight and smile through your pain.

The pinwheeling of car logos enters the brain through a lefthand hollow of eyes-once spinning they consume me.

If you could turn me on and off you would. Oh the elegance and romance of machines!

_____________________________________________________________________________________-

I AM:

a phantom limb

a subservient dominated creature

an animal as tool

as tested upon in labratories

an intersex being

a hybrid monster

a female's genetalia as my laser eye

a faceless head in conjugal relationship with a turned on computer

an apparatus with four tiny feet for

the circular repetitive motions

of information penetration

a displaced hand

conceived by a wealthy town

birthed and handled by a poor nation.

http://people.virginia.edu/~jrd8e/research.htm

-creative thinkers interested in the big ideas and the specifics which make them interesting, dedication, good communicators and collaborators who want to create a synergistic, dynamic, exciting, respectful learning experience.

-others who are interested in reading theory and experimenting with it (experimental critical writing), exploring and blurring the line between symbolic/real, creating and pairing art /music with theory/ideas/experimentation, liberation of meaning, constraints, and figuring out what that all means. Culminating in: the creation of The Book (using bookbinding, letterpress), and really expanding and being loose with the definition of "book." Hybridity = fabulous. Ideas: Analog-Digital, DVD, CD included, foldouts, popups, palimpsests, performative-happenings, prints (photography, printmaking etc), textiles, sound... lets do something that's never been done before... I'm thinking with grant money we could make a run of 100 copies. Of course this is all oh so flexible. If you like some of these ideas and want to incorporate your own skills and specific point of interest into this project- that's the idea.

Here's some ideas

Week 1-5

a)read texts: theory (gender, media, systems, semiotics/linguistics, author-reader dynamic), secondary texts explaining and riffing on theory, experimental fiction etc

b)talk about the text, ideas, and explain/learn with each other, watch films etc

c)"Fuck with shit"- S. Hendrics

-don't let the text read you

-liberate hidden possibilities of meanings hidden in the text

d) Make art, do whatever feels right for you in your artistic expression of these ideas/texts

Week 6-7/8

e) Make the book/books/art/stuff all come together as tangible objects

Week 9/10

f) Release Party/opening with readings/projections, images and other art (hung, projected etc), music or whatever else is created perhaps at Black Front, Capitol Theatre, Midnight Sun, or wherever we decide/what works out

Some theory/readings tossed around at Beauty Parlor and also some suggested by Steven Hendrics and Elizabeth:

Derrida, Barthes, Lacan

Deluze

Cixous, Irigaray

Foucault!

Butler

Rodrigo Toscano (Collapsable Poetics Theatre)

Susan Howe (The Non-Conformist's Memorial), Hassan Ihab, Rosemary Waldrop (poetic philosophic treaties),

House of Leaves

Sabald (The Rings of Saturn)

Wittgenstein

Alfred Jerry (The Science of Imaginary Solutions)

"Breathing is affected from beyond the body, is affected from within the body, to the end that the body shall always have the exact molecules in the exact quantity. Attempt to change that...Better bow your head and admit you are driven by ancient law. Or, try to deny the law, to convince yourself of the law. Hold your breath. Keep oxygen out, keep carbon dioxide in, use up the one and pile up the other, and though you are firm in your resolve, a next breath will crash through."

constraint- Antonymic translation:

Stasis/suffocation is separate from the internal bodily structure, the origin being that the external will never have the lost, anonymous organs of the undefined quality. Languish in repetition. Best raise your feet and deny we aren't dismissive of modern/contemporary chaos/systems. And, ignore your interest in chaos to remain unsure of it. Inhale. Let carbon dioxide in, keep oxygen out, store down the two, or deplete up the one, and even if you are careless in our apathy, a previous suffocation will not reboot.

I've been thinking about how cartoons/comics and quizzes/personality tests have been gendered male and female respectively, at least in my own generation's upbringing. ("Boys" read comic books about male and female superheroes with "perfect" bodybuilder-like physiques who play gender-normative roles, and "girls" read magazines with tips on how to conform to impossible, standardized beauty ideals and sex-gender normative quizzes that sort them into acceptable categories for consumption of self-identification).

So, perhaps using the comic format to talk about feminism is subversive? Also, I've noticed that Fausto-Sterling uses the cartoon format to illustrate key concepts from her book as well.

http://barclaybarrios.com/courses/cyberlit/media/cyborg1.html

    In framing his theory of power, Foucault looks beyond the questions of free will and authority, past questions that are central to the concepts of law and order in Western societies. Instead of merely asking “What is sovereign? What bond of obedience ties individuals to the sovereign?” questions reworked even by the Existentialists, he follows a course of analysis that asks different questions. These questions, he says also, “concern our bodies, our lives, our daily existences” (Gordon 187), but conceive of relations of power which are “not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded…and make it possible for it to function” (Gordon 187).

The Oxford English Dictionary includes these definitions for the word “sovereign:”

1. Of persons: Having superior or supreme rank or power 2. Of or belonging to, characteristic of, supremacy or superiority 3. A free citizen or voter of America. Sovereignty, then, has a duality in everyday meaning, being both supreme rank and independence or freedom, and is defined using the same slippery word- power - at which we are trying to grasp. If being sovereign can mean both subjugating others and the condition of being free, then perhaps the word “freedom” needs clarification. Some of the OED’s 30+ definitions of “free”: 1. Not in bondage to another. 2. Guiltless, innocent, acquitted. 3. Showing absence of constraint or timidity in one's movements. 4. Released or exempt from work or duty. 5. Of power or energy: Disengaged, available for ‘work’. Said of workmen who are not members of a trade union. Freedom can be both the exemption from work, and also the state of being ready for work.

Clearly, the most fundamental words with which we frame our concepts of self, state, politics, science, and history are subject to a plethora of contradictory, interconnecting, and complex meanings. Foucault calls this sticky situation the internal discourse of the institution- in this example the institution being institutionalized language- which uses itself to address itself, and is circulated by those that make it function. Like we shall see about power, language is everywhere- we are “always-already trapped” (Foucault 83). It is with this in mind that a deconstruction of the word “power” is attempted, and Foucault’s specific meaning and usage of the word investigated and explained.

Power has various meanings in cultural use. It is a word used to describe conditions that are political, legal, mathematical, statistical, mechanical, electrical, and optical; from quite specific to general concepts. When Foucault talks about Power he is does borrow any of these common meanings. While it seems that many of these definitions can be applied without much stretch to fit into Foucault’s theory of power, his definition is much broader, equating power with the generative properties of soil, a moving substrate, a shifting grid, an interlocking system of chains, and the processes, mechanisms, strategies, differential relations, methods, “polymorphous” techniques, and procedures in which it takes form, and the discourses which serve to transmit and produce it.

Foucault develops a concept of power that “no longer takes law as model and a code” (Foucault 90). Therefore, power cannot be conceived of as being grounded in authority or individuals with influence and control, nor the forces of armies that they command. It is not the “power/agency of the law” or the struggle against it embodied in movements like “black power” and “labor power.” It is not an authoritative general system of domination or a group of institutions and mechanisms designed to ensure the subservience of the populace. It may function this way, but it is not designed and conceived of for that purpose.

Power is also not merely, essentially prohibitive. The laws and taboos that function as prohibitions and denials are “negative elements” of power, while less acknowledged “positive” ones exist as well, consisting of specific force-relations and power-differentials being strengthened and supported by one another and functioning to invest life energy as capital in the machine of production. “Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability” (Foucault 86). Foucault posits that the deployment of the discourse of sexuality is a more sophisticated mechanism of power, which continues the control of life more clear in the older, pre 18^th century discourse of family alliances, bloodlines. In this way it effectively masks its pro-activity, rendering it tolerable to the populace.

Power is “the multiplicity of force-relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their organization; as the process through which ceaseless struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, and reverses force relations” (Foucault 92). It is the support these force relations give and receive from one-another, and also the “disjunctions and contradictions which isolate [them]… from one another,” as if forming links in a chain in a moving medium of force relations, strengthened at certain connection point as in a web. By virtue of their inequality, these force relations “constantly produce states of power at local, unstable levels” (Foucault 98). States of power are “complex strategical sitituation[s] in a particular society” (Foucault (?)). Politics is a “…more or less global strategy for co-ordinating and directing [force] relations….Every relation of force implies at each moment a relation of power (which is in a sense its momentary expression) and every power relation makes a reference… to a political field of which it forms a part” (Gordon 189). In this way it is clear that power is not something “super-structural” that originates at the top, but is generated “moment to moment…in every relation from one point to another in the field of force relations.” Power is everywhere because it is created all around us, all of the time, in the form of immediate and local power relations that are shifting and unstable.

Discourse (tactical elements in the field of force-relations) joins power with techniques of knowledge (How do we know? What do we search for? What is the process of that search? What is considered important? How do people figure into this?) Discourse justifies these techniques of knowledge by joining them with strategies of power. Foucault’s goal is not to determine if the discursive productions (what is said, who says it, how it shapes dialogue/desire/culture) are true or false as relates to sexuality, but instead to “bring out the ‘will to knowledge’ that serves as their support and their instrument” (Foucault 12). He explains how the discourse of Christian confession was translated into political, economic, and technical terms during the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie, mimicking aristocracy, became obsessed with their bloodline, but this time it was shrouded in concepts of heredity grounded in “scientific” discourse. The body, and its perceived raging, lethal sexuality became part of this obsession, stressing family dynamics and necessitating scientific medical and psychological attention. Dominant discourses, a tool and effect of power, can effectively program and control our perceptions of these shifting forces, and we give ourselves, body and mind, to the strengthening of certain power differentials and the strategies which codify and embody them in the State, law, and social hegemonies.

Since the Middle Ages, power has been represented in the Juridical/Monarchic and Political/Juridical institutions, which rely on the concept of public law as necessary to keep peace as a basis for their right to exist. Power has been formulated and exercised through law. The major concerns, concepts, and problems considered important by these institutions have molded Western societies. Concerns with issues of right, violence, law/illegality, freedom/will, state and sovereignty, were exacted with a method of power that endows some with the hierarchical right of power over life and death; a strategy of power and discourse which Foucault calls the deployment of alliance. What he endeavors to explain in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, is how another strategy of power, the deployment of sexuality, “has its reason for being… in penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way,” using techniques of power, now present at every level of the social body (family, schools, police, military, prisons, hospitals) for maximizing life for the ruling class, amplifying the aptitude and production force of life without making it more difficult to govern (Foucault 107). Masked as themes of “useful public discourses” like health, progeny, future of the species, vitality of the social body, and race, methods of power that in pre-industrial time wielded the sword, switched to modifying and controlling life. This is the ruse of capitalism’s rise to power. Foucault’s argument is that the reason we go along with it all is because this transformation is carefully shrouded in discourses that hide the specific network of power that now renders law as a system of norms, producing a “normalizing society,” that normalizes power itself, turns the old tool of punishment into the control of the body and population at all levels in new forms, and does all the work of the sword without the loss of life that is now a valuable resource.

Ultimately, economic processes acting within the state/capitalism dynamic encourage the formulation of an entire system of micro-powers concerned with the body so as to discipline it through discourses/techniques of knowledge using sex as a tool to harness the bio-power/energy of at least the working class subjects and penetrate their bodies through the discourse of science and psychology, maximizing work-life expectancy and controlling reproduction. This has taken the form of innumerable little controls; surveillance, meticulous orderings of space, and medical and psychological examinations (Foucault 145).

What Foucault is trying to say with all this set-up about power, is that we are being told by the master narrative forces, using the discourse rooted in norms of our era, that in order to liberate ourselves from the repression and silence about sex that we have supposedly endured for so long, we need to further embrace the deployment of sexuality. In reality, we have been “subject... [to the] austere monarchy of sex,” the “systematization of pleasure” according to the ‘laws’ of sex, and encouraged through various strategies of power to take it stoically (Stoic: the Greek school of philosophy advocating calm acceptance of all occurrences; the universal philosophy of the Roman Empire which Christianity incorporated), without looking it in the eye, refusing to recognize the techniques and methods of power that have acted as radical agents in the transformation of human life in the past three centuries. If the public now permits the normalization of things previously considered perverse, then the masquerade that we are still dealing with the old world’s system of alliances and laws can end. But, by accepting “sexuality” as something natural and ahistorical, rooted in science and reason, is still refusing to see the field of power in which our lives and our bodies exist. Indeed, our very liberation depends on our seeing the points of resistance that exist within the power network, and creating an informed analysis leading, ironically, to our talking about it: adapting discourses to expose and undermine the powers that bleed us of our life energy, developing new strategies of power and strengthening new force-relations that recognize and affirm life, humanity, and the endless possibilities of existence and disengage from hierarchy, segregation, racism, genocide, state and corporate directed greed, hate, and war.

To do this, perhaps we should begin by aiming, as Foucault suggests, at “a desexualization, at a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms” rather than believe we are liberating ourselves “when we ‘decode’ all pleasure in terms of a sex shorn at last of disguise” (Gordon 191). Foucault views the purpose of political analysis and criticism, as being to bring new schemas of politicization (“everything is political”). “To the vast new techniques of powers correlated with multinational economies and beaurocratic States, one must oppose/[create] a politicization which will take new forms” (Gordon 190).