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

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. 

 

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/

1. What are the structures of power/discourse that operate on us via our bodies?

 

2. What strategies of resistance can we adopt that both acknowledge and work to destabilize these structures or networks of power?

 

3. What, if anything, distinguishes the strategies that we deploy in our everyday lives from those we label as "academic/intellectual" or "artistic"?

 

http://idolator.com/tunes/the-final-countdown/artificially-intelligent-guitar-able-to-tune-itself-destroy-human-civilization-322554.php

I just found the following blog post about a new electric guitar that tunes itself.  The photo accompanying the post is of the Terminator (I think).  The post jokes about this guitar being evil and wanting to destroy the world.  I think there’s this underlying concept of this guitar as a cyborg, which goes back this cultural idea that a guitar is natural, a natural means of expressing yourself in a way that, say, an 808 or a vocoder is not.  This is a theme of my project, so I was excited to see this post.  I think the author is clearly sarcastic (i.e. they are mocking anxieties about cyborg guitars, not engaging in anxieties about them) but that what they are joking about gets at all the discourses surrounding guitars.

I wrote the following comment on the board before seminar today, but we didn’t have a chance to discuss it:

“this dude turns from werecat to zombie then in real life he turns into a woman and this dude was black then he bleached his skin cuz he wanted 2 fit in like what the hell”

- YouTube comment on the video for Thriller (accessed Monday night)

I love this comment.  When I first read it, it immediately struck me as almost a synopsis of Mercer’s article.  Mercer is talking about Jackson’s boundary crossings in the Thriller video as standing in for his boundary crossings in real life, which cause a lot of anxiety.  Though this commenter clearly still holds the anxiety about these boundary crossings, he or she has made the same connection as Mercer between the transformations in the video and the transformations in life. I feel that there is a real danger when examining popular culture of feeling that, as scholars, we understand and can make connections that others in the audience don’t or can’t make.  What I like about this quote is that it shows how someone watching music videos on YouTube for fun, and commenting on them in the informal (no capitalization or punctuation) manner that is standard for YouTube comments, can make the same connections that Mercer makes in his article.  This is not to criticize Mercer’s article by any means (which is far more complex, obviously), but just to say that we can’t pretend the average consumer of popular culture is not thinking about what they consume and making connections between things.

Here’s an example of another doll that wasn’t talked about as a class but was mentioned in my small group discussion: Homie dolls. Someone in my group suggested that they could be a negative doll but I think that they can be really positive.

Here’s a quote from the webpage that talks about them:

“The Homies are a group of tightly knit Chicano buddies who have grown up in the Mexican American barrio (neighborhood) of "Quien Sabe", (who knows) located in East Los Angeles. The four main characters are Hollywood, Smiley, Pelon, and Bobby Loco.

Their separate and distinct personalities and characteristics together make up a single, composite entity that is the "HOMIES." In an inner-city world plagued by poverty, oppression, violence, and drugs, the Homies have formed a strong and binding cultural support system that enables them to overcome the surrounding negativity and allows for laughter and good times as an anecdote for reality. The word "Homies" itself is a popular street term that refers to someone from your hometown or, in a broader sense, anyone that you would acknowledge as your friend. In use in the West Coast Latino community for decades, the word "Homies" has crossed over into the now mainstream Hip-Hop street culture that has taken America's young people by storm.”

-Dave Gonzales

Link to the website: http://www.homiesworld.com/site/

I found the first short, Vertical Roll, to be the most intruiging of all the shorts we viewed.  It was painful to watch and I did have to close my eyes here and there to stop from feeling too dizzy. But this was a really interesting and effective technique.  It was almost as if the viewer had to embody the shock, disjointedness and tortuous repetition that the artist did in her own experience.  It reminded me of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.  

The bodies of the workers are an extension of the world they inhabit and the machines they work with.  In some sense the relationship between worker and machine could be considered symbiotic, as they both depend on each other's existence to continue functioning.  However each member in the relationship is completely disposable and replaceable.  It is hard to tell which party in the relationship is in control.  

i was told that i was not holding it correctly. that eventually, i would develop arthritis in my joints, the knuckles would freeze up and i would not be able to grasp efficiently.  do i remember the first time i held a pen or pencil or crayon in my hand? no. but i do remember being enamored with the fact that it was possible to manifest thoughts, images, ideas with the help of a prosthetic: the writing or drawing utensil.