Month: August 2014

Aspects of Alterity

The Questions of Otherness

From what I understand from the text, the Other refers to the things that unknown, not in our categories of understanding.

According to Aristotle, one of the nature of human is desire to know. Our goal is to convert unknown into known.

In this article, the author discussed and questioned on otherness by using most of the informations from two philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel. Both of them have different understanding of otherness. Levinas and Marcel have different kind of relationship with the other.

Levinas preserve the otherness of the other and respect the difference of the other and self. Levinas ideal intersubjective relationship is justice while Marcel ideal relationship is closer to love (relationship).

Justice – The aim is to maintain the gap and respect the difference of the other. Good fences make good neighbors has used to describe the justice between self and other.

Love – intimacy and participation. For Marcel, if otherness is merely relative, understanding the other is a possibility and the ethical concern is to understand better. One of the reason of Love is because of emphasis on maintaining the gap and understanding,

The nature of otherness

Two possibilities of reconciliation/reunion of conflict between absolute and relative characterizations of otherness by perspective of marcel n Levinas. Then look at the development of absolute otherness and relative otherness.

Otherness is everywhere even within the self, there is also otherness.

There are many questions asked around otherness. Question in Socially otherness are issues of identity, cross cultural, multiculturalism and nationalism. This is because of the development , change of the world and globalization.

Both Marcel and Levinas have important influence with their ways of characterizing otherness. These influences have been slowly developed otherness by few other philosopher including Derrida and Caputo (Levinas side) and Paul Ricoeur and Kearney (Marcel side).

As economic and social globalisation keep on reshape the way people interact, questions of otherness will more central to issues of identity. Multiracial family, dual nationality citizens. Questions such as, who am I? What or anything do we have in common? What it means to be other?

Levinas as articulating the conditions for the possibility of ethics (egoism, autarchic independence of Self, and alterity, the absolute otherness of Other).

What is absolute otherness?

In the text, it mentioned that to remain other is to be absolute and wholly other. This was the point of view from Levinas. He thinks that none is more significant than the claim that otherness, at least as encountered in divine神 and human persons, is absolute.

What is relative otherness?

Relative otherness, there are aspects of the other that is other and aspects of the other that are somewhat recognisable/understandable. This is mainly what Marcel’s characterise about otherness which is contrast with Levinas. There is no other which is totally other.

Question of is otherness absolute or relative?

Juxtaposition between deconstruction (absolute otherness) and hermeneutics诠释学 (relative otherness). Similitude相似, aspects of things and others that somehow familiar and understandable. Means communication with other is possible, justifiable. Alterity, aspects of things and others that is totally unfamiliar. Otherness, is the chiastic relationships of alterity and similitude. Both encountered each other as aspects of otherness (otherness in ourself or of other). No other which is absolute other.

Ethic伦理

Ethically, it characterising other as absolute otherness in order to protect the uniqueness of the other, this also able to reshape our assumptions about ethics and justice.

In this paragraph, author stated that relative otherness (alterity and similitude) is better way to preserve the uniqueness of other and to respect them compare to absolute otherness because absolute otherness is a levelling accounts of other.

To love is to respect the invisibility of the other.

 

The uniqueness of other’s cultural and ritual. I see them as the Other in the aspects of ethnic, belief, religion, culture and their ritual.

 

Epistemological

Epistemologically, it also characterising other as absolute otherness but in order to recognise the limitation of human knowing, incomplete, imperfect, perspectival透视 and contextual.

Index:

Emmanuel Levinas – was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work related to Jewish philosophy, existentialism, ethics, and ontology. His notable ideas included The Other and The Face.

Gabriel Marcel -a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist.For many years, Marcel hosted a weekly philosophy discussion group through which he met and influenced important younger French philosophers like Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Paul Sartre.Marcel recognized that human interaction often involved objective characterisation of “the other”, he still asserted the possibility of “communion” – a state where both individuals can perceive each other’s subjectivity.

alterity – the state of being other or different.In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint.

hermeneutics -the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts.

ethics -moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

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The Ontology of Performance-Representation without Reproduction by Peggy Phelan

Performance is only in the present, it will become representations of representations if performance is recorded or documented. Once performance is being reproduce it will break its own ontology. If a performance being perform again, this repetition will mark it as “different“.

There is only live and mediated.

The writer used the example of stolen painting in a museum. An artist Sophie Calle has collected descriptions of the painting from visitors and staff members. She transcribed the texts and displayed beside the photographs of the gallery. In this case, the painting continue presence by memory and descriptions but without the painting itself. The speech act of memory and description become performative expression with this representation. The description help to restate and restage the effort to remember what is lost. The act of writing towards disappearance, rather than towards preservation, that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself.

Memory, sights, love involve a full seeing of the Other‘s absence, a seeing which involve the acknowledgement of the Other’s presence. To acknowledge this presence is to acknowledge one’s absence.

Writing is reproduction of the Same meaning. For example the word cat, refer and representing the four legged furry animal with whiskers. But writing about a performance is often challenging, in order to make the words become performative utterance rather than constative utterance.

Again back to J.L.Austin, he has argued that speech has both performative and constative elements.

Performative – to say is to do or make something. I do, I promise, I beg.

Constative – describing things in the world.

Performative speech act is they enact the activity of their speech signify.

In performance, the body is metonymic 转喻 of self, of voice, of character,of ‘presence’ which then the performer disappear and representing something else – dance, music, sound, character, – art.

In employing the body metonymically, performance is able to resist the reproduction of metaphor 比喻. This include metaphor of gender.  Metaphor of gender required unifies bodies which are biological different (genital).

A genre of performance called hardship art/ordeal art aims to create distinction of presence and representation, by using singular body as metonymy to experience pain.

Angelika Festa, she creates appear in order to disappear in her performances.

Angelika Festa, Untitled Dance (with fish and others), 30 to 31 May, 1987

Twenty-four hour performance in which Festa was suspended from a pole, wrapped in sheets. Her eyes were covered with silver tape, about two and a half feet from the bottom of the pole was a small black cushion which supported her bare feet. Her feet were projected onto a screen behind her in enlarged close-up. On a video monitor in front and to the left of her played a video tape loop of the embryology of a fish. Finally, on a smaller monitor facing her was a time-elapsed video documenting “the dance.”

 

Micheal Foucault thinks that the power is often in the one who listen and say nothing but not the one who speaks. Dustin Hoffman stated that performer is always in a female position in relation to power. What I understand from this statement is that the power is on spectator, to understand and think about the work, but not the performer. This shows the inequality of performer and spectator.

 

Index:

Ontology – is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.

Peggy Phelan – an American feminist scholar, one of the founders of Performance Studies International and was chair of New York University’s Department of Performance Studies. She is the author ofUnmarked (1993), Mourning Sex (1997), and Art and Feminism (2001).

Roland Barthes – was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes’ ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

William Forsythe – an American dancer and choreographer resident in Frankfurt am Main in Hessen. He is known internationally for his work with the Ballet Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company. Recognized for the integration of ballet and visual arts, his vision of choreography as an organizational practice has inspired him to produce numerous Installations, Films, and Web based knowledge creation.

Dustin Hoffman – American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.

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Choreographing Object (videos)

William Forsythe’s choreographing object works are very interesting to me. By using object and make the spectator become the performer, a tactic of shifting the roles. He somehow plays with the human natural reaction (which can be think as performance) by making or choreographing objects. I can see realness because the movements of the spectators or the players (people who play in the particular space) are not choreographed, it is not representation.

SPECTATORSHIP

The Society of the Spectacle

What Jerome Bel said about the book of The Society of the Spectacle in his performance : ‘We don’t live a life anymore, it has been replaced by its representation.’

For me, by watching the video itself is a representation. How the filmmaker represent what he has recorded and what he wants people to watch is representation.

It makes me think of what I have learned from reading The Way of Seeing by John Berger. Such as the video, news, films are actually framed and controlled by the person who shoot and edited it. We are watching the way that person’s gaze.

In the video, it mentioned that power is the root of spectacle. Spectacle(refer to mass media) is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. With the appearance of spectacular society, it ruin the quality of  human life because of lack of authenticity and this also affected human’s perceptions.

One thing I thought of is human beings are so easily affected by images. Image always help to understand something more easily. Image comes before word.

There is a statement created by Karl Marx,’within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they’re actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.’ Therefore in the society of the spectacle, there is a point saying that the commodities(material/product/thing) rule the workers and the consumers instead of being ruled by them. Commodity as the power that was colonising all social life. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified具体化 spectacle. In society of consumer, spectacle uses images to make-believe people think of the things they need and must have.

Tourism – is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalised.

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Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey

In the introduction of the article, writer used psychoanalysis to review the fascination迷恋／魅力  in the film is strengthen by the fascination that already happened individually and society which shaped him.

[Political weapon] Film reveals the society which interprets sexual difference and this control the images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. By using psychoanalysis theory to shows the patriarchal society that has structured film form. Woman function in forming patriarchal is when she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male, bound by a symbolic order in which makes the man have fantasy and obsession through linguistic command. 

Destruction Pleasure as Radical Weapon

Erotic pleasure in film.

Hollywood style has the skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure, coded erotic into the language of dominant patriarchal order.

Pleasures that offer from cinema:

– scopophilia, looking & being looked at taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. Erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object, it can produce obsessive voyeurism. Playing on audience voyeuristic fantasy and sense of separation, sexual stimulation.

– Darkness, light & shade promote illusion of voyeuristic separation, give spectator an illusion of looking in private world.

– Develop scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect, where mainstream film put attention on human form (human face, human body, relationship of human form & its surrounding).

– Jacques Lacan describe mirror:

Recognition of joyous of imagines the mirror image to be more complete & perfect than own body experience. Recognition (reflected body as self) overlaid with misrecognition (outside body itself as an ideal ego, alienated subject).

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer来人 of the Look

– sexual imbalance, active/male and passive/female. Traditionally, women appearance with strong visual and erotic impact being displayed and looked at by male gaze.

 

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 The Ballerina Phallic by Susan Leigh Foster

The text explained and analysed how a ballet duet of female and male dancers, which show the very distinctive gender behaviour – masculine and feminine qualities. She always be the object that putted in front and adored by him.

Ballet spread all over the world through colonial, media and performances. It’s aesthetic has transformed form time to time. Yet, it shows the very clear image and ideal of balletic bodies to the world.

Both her and his bodies bear the marks of colonisation and colonial contact.

An interesting point saying that the dancers erase the painfulness, struggle of their body from their facial expression. Only showing lightness, effortless of appearance even though they are doing some extreme movements.

However ballerina always become the focus point while dancing a duet with a male dancer, she achieves no tangible and enduring identity. Just as he conveys her, and she conveys desire. She exist as demonstration of the desire which is not real. He manipulated her (phallus) with his forces. To say this, it related with the gendered bodies developed historically in ballet tradition. In ballet performance, she, either she look through his eyes in order to actively assert attraction / empathise passively as the object he desired. This is all because of male hegemony, masculine logic which makes woman to be the perfect object for male gaze. The ballerina-as-phallus has problematizes the male viewer’s gaze: his identification on stage is an unmanly man (a man in tights), where he must pass on his way to become the object of fascination. In most of the dance performances, gendered identities often being considerate.

 

Index:

Spectacle – a visually striking performance or display.

– presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

Narcissism – formation of the ego and the ideal ego,
the role of narcissism in love, sexual relationships, and self-concept.

Detournement – a term coined by Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1960’s, Detournement is usually translated into English as ‘diversion’ and was the method of artistic creation used by the situationists.

Commodity Fetishism – is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value

Castration Anxiety -(psychoanalysis) anxiety resulting from real or imagined threats to your sexual functions. An overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis. Example like eunuchs? The counterpart of castration anxiety for females is penis envy.

Slavoj Žižek – a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic, a senior researcher. He writes widely on a diverse range of topics, including political theory, film theory, cultural studies, theology, and psychoanalysis.

Karl Marx – was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx’s work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. 

What is performativity and how have the performing arts appropriated the word wrongly?
What is the difference between constative and performative?
How did Derrida take the concept of performativity back to Platonic principle of the idea and what is his contribution?
How can the performative explain our societal role and what are those processes that make an action performative?
How can the speech act theory help us understand our relationship with our audience ?

 

PERFORMATIVITY

 

 

Signature Event Context (Jacques Derrida)

In the first paragraph, author discuss about the word Communication. This word does not limit itself to semantics, semiotic and linguistic, where it does not only possess one meaning.

 

In my point of view, this is one way of communication without speaking or writing.

This is the story telling part of Pushpanjali dance (Bharata Natyam). A way of using abhinaya(facial expression) and hand gestures to communicate with audience. But in order to understand it, you need contextual informations.

 

 

There is a point saying that ambiguous (indefinite) of the word ‘communication’ can be reduce by the limits of what it called a ‘context’.

Another important point from the text is that compass of voice/of gesture would face factual limit, an empirical经验 boundary of space and of time; while writing, at the same time and same place, would able to relax those limits & open wider scope on the same field. The meaning of semantics message will then be transmitted and communicated by different means in more powerful way. Thus the wholeness of meaning will not affected.

 

Why a context is never be completely determinable? This structural uncertain would have double effects:

1. it would mark the theoretical inadequacy不足之处 of the current concept of context

2. it would necessitate a certain displacement & generalisation of the concept of writing.

 

I am interested with Analogy打个比方:

-A comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

– some analogies can be understand by the people who speak the same language or same region & country. Some small group of people usually has their own analogies which only they understand them.

 

Performativity by James Loxley

Showing performative in language.

J.L.Austin defined two views of language:

1. Logical Positivism – that the normal or defining business of language is making statements, and that statements are to be assessed in terms of their truth.

2. The Descriptive Fallacy – the mistaken assumption that language use is essentially constative, aimed at the production of true or false statements/descriptions.

An important point: To say, in this instances, is to do: Austin christens this kind of sentence or utterance(statement,spoken word)话语 performative, to make clear that here ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.

Austin explained that there are rules in order to have successful performative and he stated 6 conditions:

1. existence of an accepted conventional procedure that include the utterance of certain words by certain person in certain circumstances and having the conventional effect.

2. the person and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate.

3. procedure must be executed by all participant both correctly and

4. completely

5. the procedure designes for use by persons having certain thoughts and feelings, then the participants invoking the procedure must have those thoughts and feelings, participants must intend so to conduct themselves, further

6. must conduct themselves subsequently.

Then a performative can consider success or felicitous恰当.

But does it have to be so formulated or structured?

There are also example of penalty awarded even though no foul in a football match. In this circumstances, the performance is not consider void无效. It is returning such utterance话语 to constative(denoting a speech act or sentence that is a statement declaring something to be the case).

Non-serious Performative

When the language use in a non-serious way such as in a performance, drama or poem, the performative utterance will become void. Non-serious utterance is also understood as imitation of a seriousness, called as ontological(specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them) realness.

Index

• semantics – the study of meaning, the study of linguistic development
• analogy – http://examples.yourdictionary.com/analogy-ex.html
• speech act – is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication.

 

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Being Performative (Butler)

In the subtopic Rethinking the body, Challenging Identity: The Demands of Politics,   Judith Butler questioned around how identity is being shape and constructed and asking if is the body is shaped by political forces to keep the body bounded and follow the markers of sex.

The  normative way of thinking about man and woman is always in a binary fashion and there are 3 levels:

1. sex/sexed body – female and male

2. the level of social and cultural identity of gender, which their characteristic divided properly into feminine and masculine.

3. level of sexuality and desire, which is men desiring women and women desiring men.

Feminism, Sex and Gender

Binary division is Hierarchical, where men and masculine are the primary and central, where the opposite sex is the marginal. Feminism or feminists try to challenge this framework.

• gender is the cultural constructions of sex.

Butler’s strategy is to try articulating the interflow of multiple sexual discourses at the site of identity in order to render the category, permanently problematic. The difficulty of categorise intersex and transsexual people, and explore the significance for a politics of sexuality of cross dressing and gender differentiations.

 

Performativity and The Construction of Identity

What important here is that implications drawn from Butler’s diagnosis of trouble of gender , and conceptual resources that make good that diagnosis.

Butler rejected mirror-image phenomena, where characterizing body as passive, and culture as active. What is required is an account of this terrain that able to get past the gender polarity(difference) of natural bodies and culture meanings, one who is able to rethink the complex relation between corporeality and identity.

Identity, culture is the process of creating identity, here is where the difference between body and self  is produced.

Concept of Performativity:

The identity we describe through the term gender is constituted组成 through the performance of a set of Acts that forge伪造 us as gendered subjects.

Butler mentioned that gender is prior to the various act, posture and gesture that conform根据 expected gender identity and this is performative = gender reality.

 

Our gendered acts.

The effect of gender is produced by the stylisation of body, bodily gesture, movements and style creates an illusion of an abiding gendered self.

When this repeatable acts and repetition of recognised style is being put in the public, it is conventional. This is not identity but is gender identity in being performed.

The Power of Gender Norms

In this topic, author used the theories from different philosophers such as J.L.Austin, Judith Butler and even Michel Foucault and discussed around this topic.

 

The conventional of speech situation is part of the necessary conditions of the shared world. For Austin, it is seemingly enough to call philosophy back to recognising everyday communal dimension of linguistic life. Butler thinks the norms of gender is radically  different presupposition. The performative norm is a form of  compulsion, and the composition of body itself an exercise in confining it within a limit.

It is important to understand the force and power that characterise the social relations among speaking body.  Butler’s main influence was Michel Foucault. Foucault thinks that force stops the possibilities and energies arising from other source. He also analysed a productive and positive mode of power. He mentioned that power is not a singular thing, it conceive relation of force and works on active object. Our identities are not necessary single or simple however it has been formulated and practiced. For example, the classification of homosexual in mid 90s not just got complaints, it become resources for a demand for political and legal recognition, it also continue challenge the way of thinking about nature sexuality.

 

 

Feminist – explanation of sex & sexuality which assume the meaning of human’s social existence can be derived from faces of physiology.

The body is ‘an historical idea’ rather than ‘a natural species’ by Merleau-Ponty.

Body is understand to be an active process of embodying, reflecting cultural & historical possibilities. Body is an historical idea – it gains meaning through a concrete & historically mediated expression in the world.

Beauvoir – body is a historical situation, and is a manner of doing, dramatising, reproducing a historical situation.

Gender as an act, as a corporeal style: is intentional & performative(dramatic & non-referential).

Woman (gender) – as the cultural interpretation/signification of biological fact.

To be a woman:

• become cultural sign
• to materialize oneself follow historically delimited possibilities.
• repeat corporeal project.

those who fail, regularly punished.

Read also:

http://feministtheorykeywords.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/thoughts-on-judith-butler/

INDEX:

Binary – relating, composing, involving 2 things.

Feminism -the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

Feminist theory – to understand the way of systemic political & cultural structure are enacted & reproduced, through acts & practices, and how analysis of ostensibly表面上 personal situations is clarified through situating the issue in shared cultural context.

Gendered body – acts its part in a critically restricted corporeal space & enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.

J.L.Austin – was a British philosopher of language. He is remembered primarily as the developer of the theory of speech acts.

Judith Butler -is an American continental philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory.

Jacque Derrida -a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

 

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 Biopolitics-An Advanced Introduction by Thomas Lemke

 

what is biopolitics?

Biopolitics is an intersectional field between biology and politics. The term is commonly attributed to Rudolf Kjellén in the 1920s who also coined the term geopolitics; however, it appears in print at least as early as 1912.

Biopolitics

Capitalism and the Living Multitude: Michael Hardt and Antonin Negri 

For Hardt (theorist) and Negri(philosopher), biopolitics stand for a new stage of capitalism资本主义 characterised by the disappearance of the borders between economics and politics, production and reproduction. As many activists search for theoretical instrument to analyse international politic and reconstructing of modern capitalism. They both see the economic dimension of Empire as a new stage of global capitalist production in which all states and regions of the world are integrated and connected. This foundation does not refer to the configuration of the global market but also to a previously unreached depth of capitalist socialisation. This included the constitution of manpower, production of bodies, intellects and affects.

‘Cognitive Capitalism’ slowly take over. It is distinguished by an informatized, automated, networked, and globalised production process then lead to a decisive transformation in the working subject. (knowledge and creativity, language and emotion, are central to production & reproduction within society)

This process created ‘ immaterial labor’:

1. involved in informationalized and incorporated communication technologies industrial production.

2.  the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks.

3. involves the production and manipulation of affects and requires human contact, labor in the bodily mode.

‘Human rights through a Biopolitical lens?’

 

economic exploitation: that is, the act of using another person as a means to one’s profit, particularly using their labor without offering or providing them fair retribution. Marxist theory points to the entire capitalist class as an exploitative entity, and to capitalism as a system based on exploitation.