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

Video 1-  the harsh sound felt like slaps for every time i thought about admiring the woman's body as a collection of things, of objects. She showed us only pieces of curves and lashes, tempting us to reduce her to the sum of her parts, like Hannah Hoch's Beautiful Girl. She distracts us with the shattering snap before we can romantasize her inches.  I think the army un-trains that way, tempt and slap, tempt and slap.  I wonder if Brecht would have admired this video- it seems that he was always looking to slap his audience before they could sit back and relax.
The stripteaser used this same effect of fractured images to define objectification. Without  acting, a striptease is just a series of still poses. Like a doll, we pose her in fractures to take off her clothes. 

 The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart! If Grot is the hands, or the leader of the hands- (the head of the hands, maybe?), and Joh Freder is the head, and Freder is the heart, then  what, pray tell, is Maria?  Is Maria the nervous system, sending messages, and connecting the other limbs? Is she an angel, denied a human function? I wonder what the other limbs of society are- the genitals, breasts, and feet? What about the eyes and ears? Are the feet like the hands, Grot? Or are the feet the glowing charcoal expressways?  Is "technology" the eyes and ears, like Joh Freder's special camera into Grot , like Irma's special machine in The Balcony? Or are the eyes and ears the sleuth that J. Freder hired to look after his son? Maybe the breasts are the workers who support food productions, the farmers. And really, who else would be the genitals of society except... mothers, the reproductive potential?  I thought it was interesting that the robot was called, generically, the "Machine Man", but it was obviously fashioned in a woman's shape, with a raised pubis, rounded breasts and even the shadows of nipples.

This is the third or fourth time I've seen the film, and I've become fascinated with the image of this robot- the different identities it embodies before it is even given a face and a humanoid persona. It begins as Rotwang's idyllic image of a woman who was "conquered" by another man, and made functional by him. She bore a son and then becomes his lover Maria. Maria is put to use sexually by Rotwang and then Freder, and then Rotwang again.   She passes between states of  statuesque homage to whorish ardour and back again. She only returnes to sanctity once the whore is destroyed in flames. 

Here are my presentation notes:

 

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." 

Hi bodies,

 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. 

 

Gwendolyn locks and puff ruffle coral tied with a pin to umbrella bird bulbs- is the girl-person the sum of her parts? The shapes (in any order)  to crank and wind Eyes darker and darker, turned to shade et pulvis et umbra, visne? The pattern of your dress, doll manequin, the disco ball reflects it on All of our faces-the same- but YOU are the only ones looking. What is this awareness of being looked at we bear as "consciousness"?  My consciousness is live-tuned to your looking at me, I am a living, walking reflection. I am an adult in control of my senses. I am no longer a walking reflection, I am indispensable, "but there is all this love between us", I tell her to fall asleep.. "None of these distinguishing characteristics were external...  I felt as if I were in the grip of a foreign substance... all surface, like glass eyes."

 

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

O, mouse.


I the mouse feel the ground change of life and give it away only. I am the first prostitute messenger, the plastic love child of the world's oldest professions. I relate human's Hand-and-Eye candy. I sit coy and sit poised. I am kicked often as my tail tangles.

Is the mouse the prosthetic of the computer or the human hand? Probably the hand, because the computer could run on its own without the mouse.  We are the ones who need it. Detatch the mouse and the computer is inacessible to us. The mouse confers our (need for) prosthesis upon the computer.

Oh, the funny thing about that free write is that while i was writing, i became obsessively revisited by a short story by Dorothy Parker called Big Blonde, which i started loving one day when i was fifteen and very upset about something. The big blonde is ransacked by her weasely impotant husband, and when he leaves her, she takes up with men in the building after long pungent games of poker. Though ever-weepy, she is always happy to see them stay and never sorry to see them go. Eventually she tries to take her life with sleeping pills, but she just can't die, and the ambulance man remarks that it would take "more than an axe to split that one in two". (Or something, dont trust those quotes.)

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."
 

 

 

 

 

Here are some later free writes from the Prosthesis Unit. Sometimes when nothing is coming to me, i use a persona to address the topic: 

 

 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".

These are some thoughts that I had on performance and discourse back in Week 3. They lead up to a beauty parlour presentation where i went into greater detail on the performance I saw, but my notes didnt seem to fit here.

 

 

 

 

" 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.)

Gianna D'Emilio
Knowledge

    For a hundred years, "knowledge" was a verb. It was an action to perform, used as we would now use "aknowledge"*. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a person "knowledged" what was in their sphere of consconscious experience.  As a verb, it carried the weight of an illumination under pressure, an unearthed experience aired with the hope of absolution or diagnosis. To "knowledge"  was to admit, to recognize, and to confess. To "knowledge" was to aknowledge what had once been passed over.

     As we learned with Foucault, this practice of divulging the company of authority gained an incredible value- so much importance was assigned to the act that  through the faith and dilligence of a thousand trembling lips and a two thousand trained ears, our belief in the process of confession granted it a concrete form. Knowledge ceased to be something to do, and became a "thing" itself- a pseudo-object as hopelessly cranial and invisible and honoured as any other idea.

Now a noun, "knowledge" is something shared, lost, and recovered, imparted, abandoned and managed. It bears education and offers it to anyone already educated enough to appreciate its value. With the boom of computer-technology that marked the end of the Cold War, one analyst declared that America's power structure was based in "an economy of knowledge".* The exchange of physical wealth had come to depend on the widespread transmission of a more intangible currency.


Foucault tells us that knowledge, both in its confessional verb form and in its directive noun incarnation, has been applied furiously to sex, and asks us to examine the reasons why:

" For many years we have all been living... under the spell of an immense curiosity about sex, bent on questioning it, with an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about...  As if it were essential for us to be able to draw from that little piece of ourselves not only pleasure but knowledge, and a whole subtle interchange from one to the other ...  Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex... it us up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness...  Several centuries ago it was placed at the center of a formidable petition to know... We must write the history of this will to truth, this petition to know what for so many centuries has kept us enthralled by sex: the history of a stubborn and relentless effort."*

Foucault tells us that we have been attacking the act of sex with the quest for knowlege because sex is an act performed in the shadows, shrouded, and thus in need of illumination. Because it is seen as a great mystery, and therefore an open forum for interpretation, we have assigned sex the power to identify us, to explain our behaviour, to render us defective, and to weaken our children. Sex is believed to be the source of knowledge, and is thus the victim of a knowledge-inquisition.  Foucault asks us to question and interrupt this use of knowledge, and to start by examining its source in the act of confession. He has asked us to see the verb within the noun.   



Note: Oh no! all of my footnotes turned into stars here! Does anyone know how to fix that?