We decided that the Capitol is a perfect metaphor for Foucault's imagery of discourse. Where else is juridical power manifested and embodied so clearly? Foucault tells us that beneath our visible centers of power lie "a multiple and mobile field of force relations." (History of Sexuality, 102)

This field is what Julia meant by her "net metaphor": forces of control swoop and cleave and intersect with one another where they are forced into confrontation, and eventually synthesize becoming a node.

Going to the capitol felt like delving directly into a node on the net of discourse. While it is a node it is also a mini-net of its own. 

It was a center where forces of power collide, where they literally gather and converse. 

And not just the people.

In the building we saw the intersections of force relations themselves:
We saw the intersection of the power of:

belonging and strangerliness

observational control and disembodied discourse

of monetary glitz and the representation of law

 Foucault tells us that the juridical system "is that to which all mechanisms of power can conform, and in turn, manipulate."  (pg 88.)

Where else can the priorities of power be more clearly exposed than in a legislative center washed in gold and marble?

I realized this when the inside of our state capitol looked like a picture of a gruff and stately old widow dressed in a pink floral nightie. I say a picture of an old widow because we spent two hours listening to every detail of the flooring and the ceiling, but could gather nothing about the way the building functioned or the ideas that supported it. We saw only the primpings of an external body, a lonely one.

"Whether desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive of it in relation to a power that has at its central point the enunciation of law." 

(Foucault, and I still can't find the page.)  

 I'm not continuing with the class next quarter, mostly because Ive been waiting for a chance to do this contract. If anyone's interested in the things I'm studying, I'd still really like to talk with you. Here it is. 

Dear class,

Next quarter I'm going to learn Italian, with only my robotic Italian friends on language cds and in lesson books for company- and im going to read linguistic theory by a vibrant and rigorous linguist/philosopher/mathematician named Wittgenstein, who says that it's impossible to learn a language alone. I'm looking for cohorts who are responsibly flexible, interested, and who don't mind a bit of theory or a good black and white film with subtitles and a less than linear plot. 

(That late quote was from Haruki Murakami's "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle".) 

I guess im still affected by this story because i got terribly involved in that free write, can you tell? I also wrote it thinking of a part from "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter" by J.D. Salinger. It goes,

"Sometimes, in fact, when I come in the front door, its like entering a kind of un-tidy, secular, two-woman convent. Sometimes when I leave, I have a peculiar feeling that both M. and her mother have stuffed my pockets with little bottles and tubes containing lipstick, rouge, hair nets, deodorants, and so on. I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts."
 

 How I Fell in Love With My Prosthesis:

It makes me inhibit myself just so that I could/can get a clear image of what I look like so that I can someday form an identity. What DO blonde girls wear these days, (and what don't they)? Who are some role models folks can recognize me and my beauty by, like signposts on a highway I wake up and correct my features- into a certain pattern, a certain colour, a certain size, so i can say hello! there i am again. Lines become clearer and darker others less so. My phantom glasses all come in little tubes and bottles that half the population is pushed and the other half prides themselves in knowing what I do with them. Or else they consciously don't want to know. Thats women's business. He likes me clean. One attraction, one daily, on recognition, one identity for another. I tried to give it up once. It was unnecessary, I convinced him he convinced me. But I couldn't I was unprepared for my day. My face wasnt facing quite yet. Don't shy away from your senses, girls. Wearing the face that I keep in a jar by the door is anybody fooled, is it i who is fooled? Am i one of those girls with an entirely prosthetic face? Have I been made an example of? One day I will say leached and bruised, ugly, yes, but at least its honest. An then I'll see Amelie or a magazine of my brother's and say "I could look like that".

" If you want to know the truth, its this business of desiring that makes an actor in the first place."
  J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey.


Last saturday night I saw a performance piece in which businessmen in whiteface were moving mechanically,  pulling white pieces of paper out of a briefcase, slowly the white paper turns red, and the red paper turns to blood. #1 businessman kills the other businessman by getting the blood on him, and the businessman left standing  chokes on the blood and dies. Suddenly the  iconic homeless man climbs out of some boxes, steals their coats and  all of a sudden white sand falls out of his mouth.

Expectations-
When i went to this show i thought i  thought it would be a nice escape from foucault, and a break from my reading. It turns out There Is No Escape. When Foucault makes it his job to ride such terrifically big subjects as Power, Institution, and Identity, you can find his ghost lurking everywhere, in anything.  Even performance art.

Obviously, there are a lot of ways that  that performance spoke directly to what Foucault was telling us... the subjucation of the worker became  part of the institution and the power mechanism, moving mechanically, only to be replaced by someone who provided the same functions.  But what I couldnt stop thinking about was Julia's discouse web, which made Foucaults point about  the "intricate network of power relations" really come together for me.
Fprce  relations are flowing and shifting and causing inequality and filling the gaps, and then all of a sudden two relations of power will intersect- they will be thrown into conflict, and meld, and become dependant on one another to survive.  I understand those nodes in the web, those points of intersection to be Discourse.
"Discourse- When Power Converses" TM.

It struck me that every performance I've ever seen has been a depiction of conflicts of power, and eventually this conflict of power comes to some decision, either because of death, or heredity, or political feuds, or beneficiant forgiveness.  Every story Ive ever read has boiled down to a story of what happens when streams of power are forced to negotiate. Even the stories we read as children. In an introduction to acting or writing fiction, we are first asked to examine our character's Conflict.
So, why do we do this? Why are we driven to embody conflict and tell its stories over and over again to ourselves?
I feel like performance is really just about observing some conflict of force relations and putting out bodies to it in front of others.

But why?

I think this is what Foucault means when he says "a will to knowledge". We work to understand the supports and instruments of our power discourses. In this case by embodying them. We offer our bodies up to be read as a metaphor of discourse, hoping that if we can embody relations of power, that we can understand them.

It seems like performative rituals are just embodiments of discourse that have been so important to our development that we keep performing them until they become entrenched in our daily practice.

(Foucault uses "will to knowledge" on page 12, and talks about the rituals of power on pg 86.)

Here they were:

1: When "knowledge" became a noun, it also gained the prefix "a" (which is a shorthand for the Latin prefix ab- "from", or ad-"to",) to become "aknowledge"

2:The History of Sexuality, p.77-79.

I've been ridiculously irresponsible in getting my blog up and running.  I'm finally able to post so here are some older things first. 

thanks,

gianna.