3.31.2006
Thinking Orientals (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America is a carefully plotted historical narrative of the rise and subsequent implications of the Chicago school of Sociology on the production of Asian American identity and racialization. In mapping this history through a single school of thought’s development, Yu makes important interventions and genealogical addendums to some of the key concepts of Asian American studies as currently conceived - Orientalism, marginality, culture and assimilation, just to name a few. Additionally, Yu’s mining of the strategies of dramaturgy aid in a dense, and at times, hidden, methodology of history telling, one that both demonstrates and obfuscates the same strategies used by scholars of the Chicago school to tell the stories of Orientals.
Much as a playwright might set the scene and time of a story about to unfold, Yu is attentive to space and place through out his book. As he says, “This story is about the origins and consequences of a widespread fascination with the Oriental in the United States.” (9) He begins this story by not only historically grounding us in the origins of the Chicago school’s interest in the Oriental problem as the meeting and collaboration between missionaries and scholars but by actually invoking the visualization of a map – “Imagine the map as a parchment through which to relive the past, a chart to trace the stories of people as they move about, leaving dotted lines that follow them from place to place.” (3) Throughout the first half of the book, titled “The First Movement – Coming to the West,” he introduces the reader to a cast of white sociologists, detailing both their physical and psychic movements into the world of the Oriental while developing a sociological methodology of detachment, marked by a belief that “all knowledge, not just that of the unknown and the strange but also the already known, was to be from the point of view of the outsider.” Yu confirms the performative aspect of maintaining this façade of foreign objectivity, but it is in the second movement of the book, the one which deals with the Oriental as Marginal Man, native informant and Asian American intellectual, that we begin to find a greater explication and unpacking of the theatrical nature of the costumes and stages of the subject and object stage production.
Yu begins this second movement with the ways in which Asian American scholars were drawn into the field of sociology as a means of “narrat[ing] their self identities through sociological theories such as that of the marginal man.” (111) Yu details the studies of these scholars and interestingly, unlike his discussion of the white founding fathers of the discipline, he allows these voice to be heard in direct quotes from their writings. This is particularly fascinating when laid against the use of these scholars as interpreters of culture for the same white sociologists discussed in the first movement of the book. Yu states critically that the role of the marginal man (while maintaining that the role did provide a valuable entrée into fields otherwise unknown to Asian American scholars) “as a translator and middle man between two cultures actually undercut the spectrum of acculturation on which it was putatively based” (123) he performs the critique in translating the words of the white sociologists into broadly brushed narrative while allowing the Asian American scholars to peer out boldly, in their own words, from within the text.
Yu’s knitting together of the historical exegesis of the first movement with the unmasking and critique of the second results in an important and biting critique of modern ideas of multiculturalism predicated on a erasure of race. He convincingly situates these ideas on the foundations of objectivism and the elision of bodily reality into culture and consciousness by the Chicago school. In Thinking Orientals, a Cartesian logic is belied and bodies do matter. The imbrication of time and place that is history clings to them as they inhabit the architecture of structural inequality. It is perhaps in the possible solution to these problems of structural inequality that Yu runs into a trope that is troubling to the rest of this very fine work.
Yu seeks a redemptive space in the field of Ethnic Studies and Asian American studies as a means to escape the reductive exoticism always present in majoritarian spaces – “Without at least some separate and viable institutional networks, however, the production of knowledge will continue to be dominated by the racialized structures of Orientalism.”(197) While this assertion does offer a solution to some of the concerns based on the power inequalities inherent within the academic institution (a critique Yu takes on earlier in the book when analyzing the networks of knowledge production in the Chicago school), it still leaves us with the problems of insider/outside, authentic/inauthentic that Yu unpacked so nicely in the context of the Chicago school. Further, Yu’s conclusion takes an uncritical stance towards liberal democracy in announcing “We need to create a universal standard that evaluates forms of knowledge not through the eyes of this highly restricted number of people [that is, the Chicago sociologists] but through a democratically defined dialogue that takes into account the mutual nature of ignorance and knowledge.” (Ibid) How then, after such a dialectical call, do we turn to the democratic? How then, if bodies really do matter and they matter in all their messy complexity, does the universal standard come to be? And finally, how does this democracy get mapped onto the rich narrative that Yu lays out, in which the history of one school of thought explodes out into a the multiple histories this book tells?
Keywords
Narration, Knowledge, Migration, Sociology, Oriental, Marginal
Other QE Works Cited
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America is a carefully plotted historical narrative of the rise and subsequent implications of the Chicago school of Sociology on the production of Asian American identity and racialization. In mapping this history through a single school of thought’s development, Yu makes important interventions and genealogical addendums to some of the key concepts of Asian American studies as currently conceived - Orientalism, marginality, culture and assimilation, just to name a few. Additionally, Yu’s mining of the strategies of dramaturgy aid in a dense, and at times, hidden, methodology of history telling, one that both demonstrates and obfuscates the same strategies used by scholars of the Chicago school to tell the stories of Orientals.
Much as a playwright might set the scene and time of a story about to unfold, Yu is attentive to space and place through out his book. As he says, “This story is about the origins and consequences of a widespread fascination with the Oriental in the United States.” (9) He begins this story by not only historically grounding us in the origins of the Chicago school’s interest in the Oriental problem as the meeting and collaboration between missionaries and scholars but by actually invoking the visualization of a map – “Imagine the map as a parchment through which to relive the past, a chart to trace the stories of people as they move about, leaving dotted lines that follow them from place to place.” (3) Throughout the first half of the book, titled “The First Movement – Coming to the West,” he introduces the reader to a cast of white sociologists, detailing both their physical and psychic movements into the world of the Oriental while developing a sociological methodology of detachment, marked by a belief that “all knowledge, not just that of the unknown and the strange but also the already known, was to be from the point of view of the outsider.” Yu confirms the performative aspect of maintaining this façade of foreign objectivity, but it is in the second movement of the book, the one which deals with the Oriental as Marginal Man, native informant and Asian American intellectual, that we begin to find a greater explication and unpacking of the theatrical nature of the costumes and stages of the subject and object stage production.
Yu begins this second movement with the ways in which Asian American scholars were drawn into the field of sociology as a means of “narrat[ing] their self identities through sociological theories such as that of the marginal man.” (111) Yu details the studies of these scholars and interestingly, unlike his discussion of the white founding fathers of the discipline, he allows these voice to be heard in direct quotes from their writings. This is particularly fascinating when laid against the use of these scholars as interpreters of culture for the same white sociologists discussed in the first movement of the book. Yu states critically that the role of the marginal man (while maintaining that the role did provide a valuable entrée into fields otherwise unknown to Asian American scholars) “as a translator and middle man between two cultures actually undercut the spectrum of acculturation on which it was putatively based” (123) he performs the critique in translating the words of the white sociologists into broadly brushed narrative while allowing the Asian American scholars to peer out boldly, in their own words, from within the text.
Yu’s knitting together of the historical exegesis of the first movement with the unmasking and critique of the second results in an important and biting critique of modern ideas of multiculturalism predicated on a erasure of race. He convincingly situates these ideas on the foundations of objectivism and the elision of bodily reality into culture and consciousness by the Chicago school. In Thinking Orientals, a Cartesian logic is belied and bodies do matter. The imbrication of time and place that is history clings to them as they inhabit the architecture of structural inequality. It is perhaps in the possible solution to these problems of structural inequality that Yu runs into a trope that is troubling to the rest of this very fine work.
Yu seeks a redemptive space in the field of Ethnic Studies and Asian American studies as a means to escape the reductive exoticism always present in majoritarian spaces – “Without at least some separate and viable institutional networks, however, the production of knowledge will continue to be dominated by the racialized structures of Orientalism.”(197) While this assertion does offer a solution to some of the concerns based on the power inequalities inherent within the academic institution (a critique Yu takes on earlier in the book when analyzing the networks of knowledge production in the Chicago school), it still leaves us with the problems of insider/outside, authentic/inauthentic that Yu unpacked so nicely in the context of the Chicago school. Further, Yu’s conclusion takes an uncritical stance towards liberal democracy in announcing “We need to create a universal standard that evaluates forms of knowledge not through the eyes of this highly restricted number of people [that is, the Chicago sociologists] but through a democratically defined dialogue that takes into account the mutual nature of ignorance and knowledge.” (Ibid) How then, after such a dialectical call, do we turn to the democratic? How then, if bodies really do matter and they matter in all their messy complexity, does the universal standard come to be? And finally, how does this democracy get mapped onto the rich narrative that Yu lays out, in which the history of one school of thought explodes out into a the multiple histories this book tells?
Keywords
Narration, Knowledge, Migration, Sociology, Oriental, Marginal
Other QE Works Cited
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Gender Trouble (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Gender Trouble, and in a way, the idea of Judith Butler herself, have become part of the canonical interventionist texts in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is perhaps odd approaching the work ten years after it was written, after it so troubled the politics of identity formation and the possibilities of subversion. When Butler asserts, for example, “the ‘being’ of gender is an effect,” (43) or contests reification of sex / gender binaries, it is easy as readers who have encountered the reiterations and effects of these ideas on subsequent theorizing in gender studies (and indeed, beyond) to gloss the importance of the interventions made in the text. However, it is important to perform a reading of Gender Trouble that attempts to both engage (and critique) the ideas put forth while seeking to conduct genealogical investigations (much like the ones in which Butler engages) of those very ideas.
Butler begins her text with the question, can feminist theory assume as its subject the category of “women.” As she begins the task of “taking on” the theorists Lacan, Freud, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigiray and Beauvoir, she uses a Foucauldian rubric to unsettle notions regarding the primacy of sex, after which gender follows, attempting to conclude:
“gender is also the discursive / cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”(11)
Butler attempts dislodge the idea that gender (conflated with sex) is a substance (something she finds to be underlying the arguments of most of the writers she confronts, particularly Wittig) – “that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance.”(25) The reliance on the oppositionality between the binary of “woman” and “man” is used to situate Wittig’s Lesbian is critiqued as reifying a heterosexist, humanist foundation. In using Foucault’s theory regarding the confusion of the cause of sexuality with the effect – the strategic, juridical purpose for which sexuality is created. Thus Butler moves to the position, “gender is always a doing.” (33) The impetus of identity formation is taken away from a static, pre-emptive idea of the subject and placed on the construction of that very identity. Further, Butler is revelatory in suggesting that it is not sex that comes before and informs gender, but rather gender that can (and does) inflect and re-inscribe sex.
It is perhaps interesting to note, briefly, the ways in which this first chapter of Gender Trouble serve to engage the ways in which race crosscuts sexuality and gender identity formation. As she brings up for the first time (and certainly not for the last) Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, in Butler’s teasing out of the idea of gender as doing, one may be reminded of the ways race, along side gender, can be seen as both constructed for strategic purposes and a kind of “doing,” particularly when considering, as just one example, the work of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Here three coefficients of identity - nation, gender, and race – cross one another in a troubling account that reflects Butler’s later discussion of ambivalence and drag – a discussion that implicates race, although not explicitly.
As Butler begins her second chapter, she seeks to trouble the psychoanalytic frameworks of origin regarding patriarchy and the possibility of a feminist intervention that posits an space a priori to the Law (in Lacan’s terms) that might serve as a means to dislodge the heterosexual matrix and the repressive, limited possibility for identity. However, Butler argues, once again using Foucault, that the attempt to find a space or an identity that exists before the Law is problematic in two distinct and important ways:
1. When critiquing Rivievere’s concept of a primary bisexuality: “To presume the primacy of bisexuality or the primary characterization of the libido as masculine is still not to account for the construction of these various ‘primacies.’”(69) In other words, there is no way to effectively posit a primacy before the Law if the Law is the structuring element. Foucault’s theory of productive power is neglected for a purely juridical interpretation.
2. Such assumptions as noted above lead to a tautological framework that eventually allows for the unraveling of the entire idea of an a priori identarian space.
It is with these two points that a general thrust of Gender Trouble becomes clear: it is an endeavor to dismantle the ways in which a discourse of transcendence pervades the goals of feminism (although this can be applied to other activist / subversive impulses), therefore ignoring the very real power structures to which subjects are subjected to and in which they are forced to operate. To once again interject with a simultaneous reading of race and nation, it is important to note the ways in which these particular insights can aid in a nuanced reading of diasporic longing and racial melancholia – situations that call for intervention and a space for generative identity which fall into the similar pitfalls noted above.
These general themes continue in Butler’s final chapter which aims not to dictate a means to an end (subversion, positive identity formation, etc.) but rather an opening up of possibilities by questioning how and in what ways the discourse of inscription upon the body has become naturalized. Here Kristeva, in her positing of the oppositionality of the Symbolic and the semiotic is revealed as tautological based on her simultaneous reliance and disavowal of the primacy of language:
“To attribute a causality to drives which facilitates their transformation into language and by which language itself is to be explained cannot reasonably be done within the confines of language itself.”(112)
Language is linked back to the body as creational, once again through Foucault; “the body gains meaning in discourse only in the context of power relations.”(117)
While the references to Foucault throughout this book review may seem facetious in their repetition, Butler does subject his own work to a theory of strategic power systems as she returns to his discussion of Herculine. It is at this point that the text moves into the real possibilities of opening up the body to multiple expressions of gender identity – Herculine leads Butler into a discussion of drag and performative gender. In both drawing on and critiquing Wittig’s attempt to destroy / transcend gender in the reclaiming of the “I” by the Lesbian, Butler suggests a way that the subject can speak (perhaps similar to the ways in which the subaltern seeks language?) through the performance of gender. This performance is always aware of the predilections and currency of power that informs the construction of sex / gender. Butler interjects, “Indeed, in my own view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of it’s full scale transcendence.”(158)
The tenth anniversary edition of Butler’s Gender Trouble begins with a new preface in which the author attempts to situate, from a medium-range perspective, the occasion and context of the writing of the book. Additionally, Butler indicates the modifications and interventions her subsequent work has made to the possibilities and “troubles” she incites in this book. I conclude with this as it offers at least some interjections and possibilities to push Gender Trouble further. The book seems to be known best for it’s positing of performance as intervention – it is not difficult to imagine this as the final chapter is the most troubling and problematic. As Butler herself notes in the 1999 Preface, “It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice.” (xiv) Indeed, in the closing of the final chapter, Butler seems to fall into the same trap of which she faults Foucault when he resorts to a vague description of the possibilities of productive power and the genesis of juridical power. How exactly is drag a better recourse for intervention as opposed to say, Wittig’s idea of the Lesbian? Butler does not allow herself the time to satisfactorily explain. Furthermore, Butler acknowledges the place of a strategic essentialism in the activist / interventionist impulse of queer studies and gender studies, calling into question her “tend to conceive of the claim of ‘universality in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms.”(xvii) Perhaps it is in this particular appeal that one can find a generative call to a specific and strategic (and yet multiple) identity production that may serve to engage power structures that impose gender (or other coefficients of identity) on the subject: “The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to use, and be used, by identity.”(xxvi)
Keywords
Gender, Production, Performance, Representation, Discourse.
Other QE Works Cited
Butler, J. Bodies That Matter (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror (History and Theory of the Body)
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Gender Trouble, and in a way, the idea of Judith Butler herself, have become part of the canonical interventionist texts in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is perhaps odd approaching the work ten years after it was written, after it so troubled the politics of identity formation and the possibilities of subversion. When Butler asserts, for example, “the ‘being’ of gender is an effect,” (43) or contests reification of sex / gender binaries, it is easy as readers who have encountered the reiterations and effects of these ideas on subsequent theorizing in gender studies (and indeed, beyond) to gloss the importance of the interventions made in the text. However, it is important to perform a reading of Gender Trouble that attempts to both engage (and critique) the ideas put forth while seeking to conduct genealogical investigations (much like the ones in which Butler engages) of those very ideas.
Butler begins her text with the question, can feminist theory assume as its subject the category of “women.” As she begins the task of “taking on” the theorists Lacan, Freud, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigiray and Beauvoir, she uses a Foucauldian rubric to unsettle notions regarding the primacy of sex, after which gender follows, attempting to conclude:
“gender is also the discursive / cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”(11)
Butler attempts dislodge the idea that gender (conflated with sex) is a substance (something she finds to be underlying the arguments of most of the writers she confronts, particularly Wittig) – “that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance.”(25) The reliance on the oppositionality between the binary of “woman” and “man” is used to situate Wittig’s Lesbian is critiqued as reifying a heterosexist, humanist foundation. In using Foucault’s theory regarding the confusion of the cause of sexuality with the effect – the strategic, juridical purpose for which sexuality is created. Thus Butler moves to the position, “gender is always a doing.” (33) The impetus of identity formation is taken away from a static, pre-emptive idea of the subject and placed on the construction of that very identity. Further, Butler is revelatory in suggesting that it is not sex that comes before and informs gender, but rather gender that can (and does) inflect and re-inscribe sex.
It is perhaps interesting to note, briefly, the ways in which this first chapter of Gender Trouble serve to engage the ways in which race crosscuts sexuality and gender identity formation. As she brings up for the first time (and certainly not for the last) Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, in Butler’s teasing out of the idea of gender as doing, one may be reminded of the ways race, along side gender, can be seen as both constructed for strategic purposes and a kind of “doing,” particularly when considering, as just one example, the work of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Here three coefficients of identity - nation, gender, and race – cross one another in a troubling account that reflects Butler’s later discussion of ambivalence and drag – a discussion that implicates race, although not explicitly.
As Butler begins her second chapter, she seeks to trouble the psychoanalytic frameworks of origin regarding patriarchy and the possibility of a feminist intervention that posits an space a priori to the Law (in Lacan’s terms) that might serve as a means to dislodge the heterosexual matrix and the repressive, limited possibility for identity. However, Butler argues, once again using Foucault, that the attempt to find a space or an identity that exists before the Law is problematic in two distinct and important ways:
1. When critiquing Rivievere’s concept of a primary bisexuality: “To presume the primacy of bisexuality or the primary characterization of the libido as masculine is still not to account for the construction of these various ‘primacies.’”(69) In other words, there is no way to effectively posit a primacy before the Law if the Law is the structuring element. Foucault’s theory of productive power is neglected for a purely juridical interpretation.
2. Such assumptions as noted above lead to a tautological framework that eventually allows for the unraveling of the entire idea of an a priori identarian space.
It is with these two points that a general thrust of Gender Trouble becomes clear: it is an endeavor to dismantle the ways in which a discourse of transcendence pervades the goals of feminism (although this can be applied to other activist / subversive impulses), therefore ignoring the very real power structures to which subjects are subjected to and in which they are forced to operate. To once again interject with a simultaneous reading of race and nation, it is important to note the ways in which these particular insights can aid in a nuanced reading of diasporic longing and racial melancholia – situations that call for intervention and a space for generative identity which fall into the similar pitfalls noted above.
These general themes continue in Butler’s final chapter which aims not to dictate a means to an end (subversion, positive identity formation, etc.) but rather an opening up of possibilities by questioning how and in what ways the discourse of inscription upon the body has become naturalized. Here Kristeva, in her positing of the oppositionality of the Symbolic and the semiotic is revealed as tautological based on her simultaneous reliance and disavowal of the primacy of language:
“To attribute a causality to drives which facilitates their transformation into language and by which language itself is to be explained cannot reasonably be done within the confines of language itself.”(112)
Language is linked back to the body as creational, once again through Foucault; “the body gains meaning in discourse only in the context of power relations.”(117)
While the references to Foucault throughout this book review may seem facetious in their repetition, Butler does subject his own work to a theory of strategic power systems as she returns to his discussion of Herculine. It is at this point that the text moves into the real possibilities of opening up the body to multiple expressions of gender identity – Herculine leads Butler into a discussion of drag and performative gender. In both drawing on and critiquing Wittig’s attempt to destroy / transcend gender in the reclaiming of the “I” by the Lesbian, Butler suggests a way that the subject can speak (perhaps similar to the ways in which the subaltern seeks language?) through the performance of gender. This performance is always aware of the predilections and currency of power that informs the construction of sex / gender. Butler interjects, “Indeed, in my own view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of it’s full scale transcendence.”(158)
The tenth anniversary edition of Butler’s Gender Trouble begins with a new preface in which the author attempts to situate, from a medium-range perspective, the occasion and context of the writing of the book. Additionally, Butler indicates the modifications and interventions her subsequent work has made to the possibilities and “troubles” she incites in this book. I conclude with this as it offers at least some interjections and possibilities to push Gender Trouble further. The book seems to be known best for it’s positing of performance as intervention – it is not difficult to imagine this as the final chapter is the most troubling and problematic. As Butler herself notes in the 1999 Preface, “It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice.” (xiv) Indeed, in the closing of the final chapter, Butler seems to fall into the same trap of which she faults Foucault when he resorts to a vague description of the possibilities of productive power and the genesis of juridical power. How exactly is drag a better recourse for intervention as opposed to say, Wittig’s idea of the Lesbian? Butler does not allow herself the time to satisfactorily explain. Furthermore, Butler acknowledges the place of a strategic essentialism in the activist / interventionist impulse of queer studies and gender studies, calling into question her “tend to conceive of the claim of ‘universality in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms.”(xvii) Perhaps it is in this particular appeal that one can find a generative call to a specific and strategic (and yet multiple) identity production that may serve to engage power structures that impose gender (or other coefficients of identity) on the subject: “The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to use, and be used, by identity.”(xxvi)
Keywords
Gender, Production, Performance, Representation, Discourse.
Other QE Works Cited
Butler, J. Bodies That Matter (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror (History and Theory of the Body)
3.30.2006
The Oxford Guide to Film Studies - Selections (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church (eds.) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
I'm just going to break this down by the excerpts I read:
"Film Acting" Paul McDonald: Film acting hasn't really got much attention in film theory. Acting is often seen as good when it is "authentic," "truthful," etc. but it isn't just about that - acting is understood as such and part of that understanding is the technology of the film (angles, lighting, etc.) So gives the meaning? Well both. John Ellis says that the actor is part of the fetishistic mechanism of film, presense in absence. (this is with Bejamin and stuff) - but the problem with this is it doesn't really take into account the body of the actor. James Narramore talks about framing and how simply being within the frame of the film designates the actor as oversignified. Barry King talks about impersonation (Capote). Richard Dyer attempts to set up a way of analyzing acting, but Roberta Pearson, in her semiotic code of histrionic vs. verisimilar, does a better job at it. This is good, but we need to remember that there are different types of acting methods (Method, etc.)
"Impressionism, Surealism and Film Theory" Robert B. Ray: This essay is about the two schools of film making mentioned in the title and aims to answer the question of how the two, I guess, prongs of cinema work together (or not) - that it is like life or that it is magical, and how this can be shown mechanically and if it can be mass produced. So Eisenstein is on the side of art and magic - "a medium's aesthetic value is a direct functioning of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material." (68)This view, we can see, has triumphed over the surrealist and impressionist views. They emphasized mechanizism, "photogenie," to either show real life as real life, fragmentary and stuff, but also, being influenced by Psychoanalysis, the dream world was also of interest to them. "For the Impressionists, photogenie was untranslatable but intentional, the product of particularly talented film makers. For the Surrealists, on the other hand, it was often accidental, and thus capable of appearing anywhere." (71) However, there is photogenie in the Eisenstein school of film making, and seizing on to it (like with beautiful moments in a mass market film) aided the mass appeal of the big time movies. That is, while Surrealism/Impressionism, often get dismissed these days for over reliance on fetishism (photogenie as fetishism), it isn't like that can't be found in mass market films too. Then there is Andre Bazin, who argued "that film's true destiny is the objective representation of reality."(71) But at the same time, there is am ambivalence towards intentionality in Bazin (Bazin and his followers the Cahiers critics)that is evinced in the term "mise-en-scene...is not merely the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words, but also the gap between the intention of the director and his effect on the spectator." (Bazin, 72)But Eisenstein won in the end, we can possibly say that is because of path dependence (like why more people use PCs as opposed to Macs). Film studies as it moved to the universities was influenced by semiotics (structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic and gender theory) but then, even Barthes had to admit, this started getting kinda old. The author advises for a "heuretic film studies [which] might begin whre photogenie, third meanings, and fetishism might intersect." (74)
"Film and Psychoanalysis" Barbara Creed:Psychoanalytic criticism had a huge impact on film studies. First the surrealists, with their Freudian interest in dream states. Then apparatus theory (Baudry, Metz) as a way that broadened the structuralist approach out - the viewer is going through some Oedipal drama when watching a movie, trying to unite with the absent presence - the imaginary signifer- on the screen but can't ever do it, or it can be read in a Lacanian mirror stage kinda way. Then there are the feminists like Laura Mulvey who notes that apparatus theory always posits a male viewer and wonder how women can look at film without, I guess, dying or something. It still works of the Oedipal triangle, positing Oedipal heroines. Then there are the people like Elizabeth Cowie who posit a more mobile gaze of the viewer by thinking about fantasy in relation to film - like child psychology stuff. Then the reactions of people like Richard Dyer and Kaja Silverman who also try to trouble what is going on with the gaze in cinema and think about how it doesn't always produce sadist men, but maybe masochistic men (who can't desire the male bodies on the scree, etc.) Then there were the cognitivists who lashed out at the psychoanalysts because they said that it was all based on unprovable crap and argued for a more sociological approach with studying actual viewers. Then some said it was ahistorical or that it only focused on ideal, non-existent viewers (basically, ignoring materialism). Cultural studies is a response to all this, not throwing out the psyschoanalysis (most of the time), but taking into account the critiques, too. Then, at the end, of course, there are the brown people who use psychoanalysis (Bhabha, et al) to critique filmic representations of the racialized other and queer theory who use it to critique gender binarism.
"Feminism and Film" Patricia White: A lot of the insight here was in the Pyschoanalysis chapter. But it starts with reflection theory - that filmic representations reflect what society thinks - here you get people looking for good and bad representation - not really that helpful. Semiotics was a bit of a response to this - women as sign, perhaps multi-valent. Then pyschoanalysis (Mulvey et al) and the gaze, who looks, who is looked at. Then an interest in "women's films" like weepies and recent stuff like soap operas. It links the idea of spectatorship from Psych with the repsentations of the semiotics. Some say these films are bad some say that the pleasure derived from them can be..."liberating" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Also important to other feminist readings is reception studies and "intertextuality" - that the stars mean something outside of their representation on the film (Katherine Hepburn, etc.) Then we have to consider women's film making, Alice Guy-Blanche and Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Further, there have been several women filmmakers in art, new national, documentary and third cinema. Finally, feminist film criticism has to content with "postmodernism" and the loss of the subject (I think this is kinda dumb, btw.)
"Gay and Lesbian Criticism" Anneke Smelik: Starts with a discussion of Russo's "The Celuloid Closet" but critiques it for assuming that there is some linear progession of oppression to outness in Hollywood. Gay and Lesbian crit first is focused on issues of stereotype and representation, but like reflection theory, this is kinda binaristic. Richard Dyer offers a way of understanding how these stereotypes are deployed strategically to guard against hetereosexual failure. Then authorship offered another problem as it arose around the time of authors dying (authoriship bad, unless it is a gay author) but it was still important to recognize pioneers like Dorothy Arzner. Gay and Lesbian crit undertakes oppositional readings of dominant texts a lot, also taking into account Gay and Lesbian spectatorship - this complicates pyschoanalytic feminist film crit, as you can imagine because it throws off Oedipal desire and can look at the male body as object of desire. Camp is one mode of reading against the dominant in film - humor inflected with pathos. Then of course, there is Gay and Lesbian film making to consider. This can be traced historically, in art house films which are usually not as political as identity politics based films which can be reductive which then get remedied by magical film makers with mutliple jeopardies like Marlon Riggs. Oh to be hybrid.
"Queer Theory" Alexander Doty: Queer film theory complicates the identitarian and binaristic thinking found in feminist and Gay and Lesbin film theory (although Queer is a heavily contested term - is it just a hip way of saying gay? can heterosexuals be queer? does it have something to do with authorship? etc.) but the way this article seems to read it is: "'queer' would be reserved for those films and popular culture texts, spectator positions, pleasures and readings that articulate spaces outside gender binaries and sexuality categories" (150) - it's a way of reading.
"Race, Ethnicity, and Film" Robyn Wiegman: The study of race and ethnicity in film has taken a different course than feminist/GBLT/Queer readings as it has generally followed the trajectory of specific ethnic group studies in the US as opposed to the progression of action/reaction of the former (at least, that is how it is posited in this book). We get a definition of ethnicity and race - note the invisibility of whiteness here. Like in GL/Queer studies of film, much of this work began with an examining of stereotype, with all its attendent problems. This essay looks at the different types of stereotypes for various racialized groups. There is more, but I feel like this essay is not really that worth summing up here. I hope that didn't sound bad.
"Early American Film" Tom Gunning: This essay is about the pre-classical period of cinema. It has been often neglected in film studies because it is so radically different from what we can even begin to understand. "Early cinema can be understood as 'pre-classical,' standing in varying degrees outside the codes of spatial and temporal relations that define the stability of the classical Hollywood film...I felt that the essential gesture of early cinema (which could not be described as an incomplete mastery of storytelling) lay in its aggressive address to the spectator's attention." (257) So you have things exploding or other arresting large gestures as opposed to narrative of the classical period. "Narrative coherence was supplied in the act of reception, rather than inherent in the film itself."(259) This leads to the ways in which at first, when film didn't have such centralized distribution, there was more local variation to the way it was received by the audience. There is a question of the class of this audience - while vaudvilles catered to more middle class audiences, nickelodians were attended by the lower clases (this is heatedly debated, thought). From 1913-15 things got more narativized and centralized in terms of distribution. Some say this had to do with wanting to make the cinema more respectable as opposed to the bang-zoom appreciated by the lower class. The chapter closes with a discussion on the effects of modernity on the ways in which early cinema progressed.
"Concepts of National Cinema" Stephen Crofts: National cinema is tought because nations are tough - why do we consider French films particularly French, etc. At least, this wasn't problematized much until the 80s, predictably arising alongside postcolonial studies. So we have arguments for nation-state cinema to be defined not just on geo-political boundaries but on other categories of classicafication informed by the nation-state as locus (Production, Distribution and exhibition, Audiences, Discourses, Textuality, National-cultural specificity, Cultural specificity of genres, the role of the state, and the global range of nation-state cinemas). Further,we need to think of films as being Industrial, Cultural or Anti-state and different cinemas (Hollywood, Art, and Third Cinema respectively, for example) slot into those places.
"Modernism and the Avant-Gardes" Murray Smith: How is the avant-garde understood in film theory and history? The avant-garde is made outside the classical Hollywood (or I guess Industrial if we look at the above framework and want to globalize our categorization) purview. It is not art cinema. It can be understood as parallel or reactive, but eitherway as alternative and radically other. Often it challenges narrative and realism. Modernism can be seen in relation to the rise of the Avant-Garde. Some Avant-garde is political some isn't. There is a lot of inspiration from DADA, which leads to surrealism - but avant-garde always has a dialectical relationship to the mainstream. After WWII, we see the rise of art cinema (not avant garde), counter-cinema (Brechtian influence), and Third Cinema (anti-state, usually out of the global south, seems to implicate the importance of brown people having to die to make it). Then there is the post-war period in New York (Richter, Deren, Brakhage). Also Andy Warhol in the 60s and 70s. There is also a feminist avant-garde, obviously more political than some of the stuff discussed above. The chapter concludes with a discussion of "postmodernism" and the avant-garde - can anything be avant in the age of pomo?
Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church (eds.) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
I'm just going to break this down by the excerpts I read:
"Film Acting" Paul McDonald: Film acting hasn't really got much attention in film theory. Acting is often seen as good when it is "authentic," "truthful," etc. but it isn't just about that - acting is understood as such and part of that understanding is the technology of the film (angles, lighting, etc.) So gives the meaning? Well both. John Ellis says that the actor is part of the fetishistic mechanism of film, presense in absence. (this is with Bejamin and stuff) - but the problem with this is it doesn't really take into account the body of the actor. James Narramore talks about framing and how simply being within the frame of the film designates the actor as oversignified. Barry King talks about impersonation (Capote). Richard Dyer attempts to set up a way of analyzing acting, but Roberta Pearson, in her semiotic code of histrionic vs. verisimilar, does a better job at it. This is good, but we need to remember that there are different types of acting methods (Method, etc.)
"Impressionism, Surealism and Film Theory" Robert B. Ray: This essay is about the two schools of film making mentioned in the title and aims to answer the question of how the two, I guess, prongs of cinema work together (or not) - that it is like life or that it is magical, and how this can be shown mechanically and if it can be mass produced. So Eisenstein is on the side of art and magic - "a medium's aesthetic value is a direct functioning of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material." (68)This view, we can see, has triumphed over the surrealist and impressionist views. They emphasized mechanizism, "photogenie," to either show real life as real life, fragmentary and stuff, but also, being influenced by Psychoanalysis, the dream world was also of interest to them. "For the Impressionists, photogenie was untranslatable but intentional, the product of particularly talented film makers. For the Surrealists, on the other hand, it was often accidental, and thus capable of appearing anywhere." (71) However, there is photogenie in the Eisenstein school of film making, and seizing on to it (like with beautiful moments in a mass market film) aided the mass appeal of the big time movies. That is, while Surrealism/Impressionism, often get dismissed these days for over reliance on fetishism (photogenie as fetishism), it isn't like that can't be found in mass market films too. Then there is Andre Bazin, who argued "that film's true destiny is the objective representation of reality."(71) But at the same time, there is am ambivalence towards intentionality in Bazin (Bazin and his followers the Cahiers critics)that is evinced in the term "mise-en-scene...is not merely the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words, but also the gap between the intention of the director and his effect on the spectator." (Bazin, 72)But Eisenstein won in the end, we can possibly say that is because of path dependence (like why more people use PCs as opposed to Macs). Film studies as it moved to the universities was influenced by semiotics (structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic and gender theory) but then, even Barthes had to admit, this started getting kinda old. The author advises for a "heuretic film studies [which] might begin whre photogenie, third meanings, and fetishism might intersect." (74)
"Film and Psychoanalysis" Barbara Creed:Psychoanalytic criticism had a huge impact on film studies. First the surrealists, with their Freudian interest in dream states. Then apparatus theory (Baudry, Metz) as a way that broadened the structuralist approach out - the viewer is going through some Oedipal drama when watching a movie, trying to unite with the absent presence - the imaginary signifer- on the screen but can't ever do it, or it can be read in a Lacanian mirror stage kinda way. Then there are the feminists like Laura Mulvey who notes that apparatus theory always posits a male viewer and wonder how women can look at film without, I guess, dying or something. It still works of the Oedipal triangle, positing Oedipal heroines. Then there are the people like Elizabeth Cowie who posit a more mobile gaze of the viewer by thinking about fantasy in relation to film - like child psychology stuff. Then the reactions of people like Richard Dyer and Kaja Silverman who also try to trouble what is going on with the gaze in cinema and think about how it doesn't always produce sadist men, but maybe masochistic men (who can't desire the male bodies on the scree, etc.) Then there were the cognitivists who lashed out at the psychoanalysts because they said that it was all based on unprovable crap and argued for a more sociological approach with studying actual viewers. Then some said it was ahistorical or that it only focused on ideal, non-existent viewers (basically, ignoring materialism). Cultural studies is a response to all this, not throwing out the psyschoanalysis (most of the time), but taking into account the critiques, too. Then, at the end, of course, there are the brown people who use psychoanalysis (Bhabha, et al) to critique filmic representations of the racialized other and queer theory who use it to critique gender binarism.
"Feminism and Film" Patricia White: A lot of the insight here was in the Pyschoanalysis chapter. But it starts with reflection theory - that filmic representations reflect what society thinks - here you get people looking for good and bad representation - not really that helpful. Semiotics was a bit of a response to this - women as sign, perhaps multi-valent. Then pyschoanalysis (Mulvey et al) and the gaze, who looks, who is looked at. Then an interest in "women's films" like weepies and recent stuff like soap operas. It links the idea of spectatorship from Psych with the repsentations of the semiotics. Some say these films are bad some say that the pleasure derived from them can be..."liberating" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Also important to other feminist readings is reception studies and "intertextuality" - that the stars mean something outside of their representation on the film (Katherine Hepburn, etc.) Then we have to consider women's film making, Alice Guy-Blanche and Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Further, there have been several women filmmakers in art, new national, documentary and third cinema. Finally, feminist film criticism has to content with "postmodernism" and the loss of the subject (I think this is kinda dumb, btw.)
"Gay and Lesbian Criticism" Anneke Smelik: Starts with a discussion of Russo's "The Celuloid Closet" but critiques it for assuming that there is some linear progession of oppression to outness in Hollywood. Gay and Lesbian crit first is focused on issues of stereotype and representation, but like reflection theory, this is kinda binaristic. Richard Dyer offers a way of understanding how these stereotypes are deployed strategically to guard against hetereosexual failure. Then authorship offered another problem as it arose around the time of authors dying (authoriship bad, unless it is a gay author) but it was still important to recognize pioneers like Dorothy Arzner. Gay and Lesbian crit undertakes oppositional readings of dominant texts a lot, also taking into account Gay and Lesbian spectatorship - this complicates pyschoanalytic feminist film crit, as you can imagine because it throws off Oedipal desire and can look at the male body as object of desire. Camp is one mode of reading against the dominant in film - humor inflected with pathos. Then of course, there is Gay and Lesbian film making to consider. This can be traced historically, in art house films which are usually not as political as identity politics based films which can be reductive which then get remedied by magical film makers with mutliple jeopardies like Marlon Riggs. Oh to be hybrid.
"Queer Theory" Alexander Doty: Queer film theory complicates the identitarian and binaristic thinking found in feminist and Gay and Lesbin film theory (although Queer is a heavily contested term - is it just a hip way of saying gay? can heterosexuals be queer? does it have something to do with authorship? etc.) but the way this article seems to read it is: "'queer' would be reserved for those films and popular culture texts, spectator positions, pleasures and readings that articulate spaces outside gender binaries and sexuality categories" (150) - it's a way of reading.
"Race, Ethnicity, and Film" Robyn Wiegman: The study of race and ethnicity in film has taken a different course than feminist/GBLT/Queer readings as it has generally followed the trajectory of specific ethnic group studies in the US as opposed to the progression of action/reaction of the former (at least, that is how it is posited in this book). We get a definition of ethnicity and race - note the invisibility of whiteness here. Like in GL/Queer studies of film, much of this work began with an examining of stereotype, with all its attendent problems. This essay looks at the different types of stereotypes for various racialized groups. There is more, but I feel like this essay is not really that worth summing up here. I hope that didn't sound bad.
"Early American Film" Tom Gunning: This essay is about the pre-classical period of cinema. It has been often neglected in film studies because it is so radically different from what we can even begin to understand. "Early cinema can be understood as 'pre-classical,' standing in varying degrees outside the codes of spatial and temporal relations that define the stability of the classical Hollywood film...I felt that the essential gesture of early cinema (which could not be described as an incomplete mastery of storytelling) lay in its aggressive address to the spectator's attention." (257) So you have things exploding or other arresting large gestures as opposed to narrative of the classical period. "Narrative coherence was supplied in the act of reception, rather than inherent in the film itself."(259) This leads to the ways in which at first, when film didn't have such centralized distribution, there was more local variation to the way it was received by the audience. There is a question of the class of this audience - while vaudvilles catered to more middle class audiences, nickelodians were attended by the lower clases (this is heatedly debated, thought). From 1913-15 things got more narativized and centralized in terms of distribution. Some say this had to do with wanting to make the cinema more respectable as opposed to the bang-zoom appreciated by the lower class. The chapter closes with a discussion on the effects of modernity on the ways in which early cinema progressed.
"Concepts of National Cinema" Stephen Crofts: National cinema is tought because nations are tough - why do we consider French films particularly French, etc. At least, this wasn't problematized much until the 80s, predictably arising alongside postcolonial studies. So we have arguments for nation-state cinema to be defined not just on geo-political boundaries but on other categories of classicafication informed by the nation-state as locus (Production, Distribution and exhibition, Audiences, Discourses, Textuality, National-cultural specificity, Cultural specificity of genres, the role of the state, and the global range of nation-state cinemas). Further,we need to think of films as being Industrial, Cultural or Anti-state and different cinemas (Hollywood, Art, and Third Cinema respectively, for example) slot into those places.
"Modernism and the Avant-Gardes" Murray Smith: How is the avant-garde understood in film theory and history? The avant-garde is made outside the classical Hollywood (or I guess Industrial if we look at the above framework and want to globalize our categorization) purview. It is not art cinema. It can be understood as parallel or reactive, but eitherway as alternative and radically other. Often it challenges narrative and realism. Modernism can be seen in relation to the rise of the Avant-Garde. Some Avant-garde is political some isn't. There is a lot of inspiration from DADA, which leads to surrealism - but avant-garde always has a dialectical relationship to the mainstream. After WWII, we see the rise of art cinema (not avant garde), counter-cinema (Brechtian influence), and Third Cinema (anti-state, usually out of the global south, seems to implicate the importance of brown people having to die to make it). Then there is the post-war period in New York (Richter, Deren, Brakhage). Also Andy Warhol in the 60s and 70s. There is also a feminist avant-garde, obviously more political than some of the stuff discussed above. The chapter concludes with a discussion of "postmodernism" and the avant-garde - can anything be avant in the age of pomo?
3.29.2006
Imagine Otherwise (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Chuh, Kandace. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
"Imagine Otherwise undertakes a critical consideration of Asian American studies...I mean to ask after the coherency and object(ive)s of Asian American studies and to understand its work as both an academic field and an explicitly political project." (4) What this entails for Chuh is positing that Asian American studies should be reconsidered in light of Poststructuralist and Postcolonial critique. Further, Asian American studies should be envisioned as a subjectless discourse as the multiplicity of AA is irreducible, so much so that it doesn't make any sense to posit it upon identity, but rather as a theory that undoes and critique dominant US nationalism and Asian Americanist claims to coherence based on positivist notions of race, identity, etc. "Subjectlessness as a discursive ground for Asian American studies can, I think, help to identity and trace the shifting positionalities and complicated terrains of U.S. American culture and politics articulated to a globalized frame, by opening up the field to account for practices of subjectivity that might not be immediately visible." (11) Chuh makes a case for reckoning with intra-Asian American difference and for theory as important in a field that so often bifurcates itself into theory v. practice (with practice taking on the dominat, legitimized space of historical consituent for the field itself) - to do what Chuh suggests neccessitates a materialist engagement with literature that she takes on in her first two chapters. She examines Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart and the work of Bienvenido Santos to make her first point - the inability for AA to cope with the difference posed by Filipino American experience "compels us to hold as suspect the promise of justice through the achievement of subjectivity." (32) "'Filipinos' may be understood as a category of critique rather than identity." (56) She looks at texts on Japanese internment to locate a transnationalist critique of AA studies, to see beyond the ways in which AA has used nation as the main vector of understanding racial identity. "These legal and literary narratives compel us to identify the process of the affiliation of meaning to certain bodies as the collectivizing problematic anchoring and necessitating Asian American discourse." (63) "What I am suggesting is that the imperative for Asian Americanists to think in terms of transnationalism arise not only from globalization but also from recognizing the transnational within the national, from understanding that Asiatic racialization traces and materializes the transnational dimensions of U.S. national identity." (70) The next chapter expands on this imperative in its call for AA studies not to reinscribe Orientalist figures of othering on the Asian in Asian American. "What I am suggesting is that critically acknowledging the material effectivity of multiply located histories and chronologies...means recognizing the limitations of knowledge produced by distancing 'America' from 'Asia' as limitations that do ideological work...We might conceive of 'Asian America' as a heterotropic formation, one that enfigures the multiple and dissimilar spaces and places of discourse and history that collectively produce what seems at first glance, terminologically, to refer to a distinctly bounded site, 'America.'" (111) Finally, the last chapter looks at what is at stake in positing Postcolonial studies as important for AA studies. "Postcolonial studies contributes to Asian Americanist discourse by highlighting the ways that national identities come into being through negotiations with global nexuses of relations and power." (117) As such the US needs to be recognized as not just neocolonial, but as part of a history of empire and intra(?)colonization. "I want to suggest that Asian Americanists conceptually disown 'America,' the ideal, to further the work of creating home as a space relieved of states of domination...I am conceived of home as that condition in which there is an equality of ability to participate in negotiating and constructing the ethos of the places in which we live." (124) These Postcolonial critiques are important not only for our understanding of "America," but also for a critical engagement with Asian American studies as a discipline. "Asian American studies stands as a discourse not of 'minorities' but of the 'emergent dominate,' to borrow Gayatri Spivak's phrase (1997), Asian Americanist discourse must look to itself to ensure that the partial and variagated freedoms enjoyed by both Asian American studies and various Asian-raced peoples are not merely celebrated but are leading to an elsewhere." (145)
Keywords
Difference, Asian American studies, Asian Americanist, Poststructuralist, Subjectlessness, Anxiety, Undecidability
Other Thoughts
I have many feelings about the arguments put forth in this book, too many to elaborate here. Ask me about them sometime.
"Far from being a transparent, objective description of a knowable identity, the term [Asian American] may be conceived as a mediating presence that links bodies to the knowledge regimes of the U.S. nation. 'Asian America' is in this sense a metaphor for resistance and racism." (27)
"Recall that identity is a teleological narrative used in a politics of identity, one that posits a common origin and looks toward a common destiny." (33)
"Imagine Otherwise has suggested embracing the a priori meaninglessness of 'Asian American,' the absence of an identity anterior to naming." (149)
"What, finally, I think subjectlessness can help us to do is to articulate Asian American studies as an unbounded field, one that while in the structure of the academic institution is not structured by it." (151)
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities.(Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, H. Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, P. The Nation and its Fragments. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chuh, K and Shimikawa, K. Orientations (selections) (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Lowe, L. Immigrant Acts. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Palumbo-Liu, D. Asian/American (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Shohat, E. Stam, R. Unthinking Eurocentricism (selections) (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Trinh, T.When the Moon Waxes Red (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Wong, S. Denationalization Reconsidered (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chuh, Kandace. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
"Imagine Otherwise undertakes a critical consideration of Asian American studies...I mean to ask after the coherency and object(ive)s of Asian American studies and to understand its work as both an academic field and an explicitly political project." (4) What this entails for Chuh is positing that Asian American studies should be reconsidered in light of Poststructuralist and Postcolonial critique. Further, Asian American studies should be envisioned as a subjectless discourse as the multiplicity of AA is irreducible, so much so that it doesn't make any sense to posit it upon identity, but rather as a theory that undoes and critique dominant US nationalism and Asian Americanist claims to coherence based on positivist notions of race, identity, etc. "Subjectlessness as a discursive ground for Asian American studies can, I think, help to identity and trace the shifting positionalities and complicated terrains of U.S. American culture and politics articulated to a globalized frame, by opening up the field to account for practices of subjectivity that might not be immediately visible." (11) Chuh makes a case for reckoning with intra-Asian American difference and for theory as important in a field that so often bifurcates itself into theory v. practice (with practice taking on the dominat, legitimized space of historical consituent for the field itself) - to do what Chuh suggests neccessitates a materialist engagement with literature that she takes on in her first two chapters. She examines Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart and the work of Bienvenido Santos to make her first point - the inability for AA to cope with the difference posed by Filipino American experience "compels us to hold as suspect the promise of justice through the achievement of subjectivity." (32) "'Filipinos' may be understood as a category of critique rather than identity." (56) She looks at texts on Japanese internment to locate a transnationalist critique of AA studies, to see beyond the ways in which AA has used nation as the main vector of understanding racial identity. "These legal and literary narratives compel us to identify the process of the affiliation of meaning to certain bodies as the collectivizing problematic anchoring and necessitating Asian American discourse." (63) "What I am suggesting is that the imperative for Asian Americanists to think in terms of transnationalism arise not only from globalization but also from recognizing the transnational within the national, from understanding that Asiatic racialization traces and materializes the transnational dimensions of U.S. national identity." (70) The next chapter expands on this imperative in its call for AA studies not to reinscribe Orientalist figures of othering on the Asian in Asian American. "What I am suggesting is that critically acknowledging the material effectivity of multiply located histories and chronologies...means recognizing the limitations of knowledge produced by distancing 'America' from 'Asia' as limitations that do ideological work...We might conceive of 'Asian America' as a heterotropic formation, one that enfigures the multiple and dissimilar spaces and places of discourse and history that collectively produce what seems at first glance, terminologically, to refer to a distinctly bounded site, 'America.'" (111) Finally, the last chapter looks at what is at stake in positing Postcolonial studies as important for AA studies. "Postcolonial studies contributes to Asian Americanist discourse by highlighting the ways that national identities come into being through negotiations with global nexuses of relations and power." (117) As such the US needs to be recognized as not just neocolonial, but as part of a history of empire and intra(?)colonization. "I want to suggest that Asian Americanists conceptually disown 'America,' the ideal, to further the work of creating home as a space relieved of states of domination...I am conceived of home as that condition in which there is an equality of ability to participate in negotiating and constructing the ethos of the places in which we live." (124) These Postcolonial critiques are important not only for our understanding of "America," but also for a critical engagement with Asian American studies as a discipline. "Asian American studies stands as a discourse not of 'minorities' but of the 'emergent dominate,' to borrow Gayatri Spivak's phrase (1997), Asian Americanist discourse must look to itself to ensure that the partial and variagated freedoms enjoyed by both Asian American studies and various Asian-raced peoples are not merely celebrated but are leading to an elsewhere." (145)
Keywords
Difference, Asian American studies, Asian Americanist, Poststructuralist, Subjectlessness, Anxiety, Undecidability
Other Thoughts
I have many feelings about the arguments put forth in this book, too many to elaborate here. Ask me about them sometime.
"Far from being a transparent, objective description of a knowable identity, the term [Asian American] may be conceived as a mediating presence that links bodies to the knowledge regimes of the U.S. nation. 'Asian America' is in this sense a metaphor for resistance and racism." (27)
"Recall that identity is a teleological narrative used in a politics of identity, one that posits a common origin and looks toward a common destiny." (33)
"Imagine Otherwise has suggested embracing the a priori meaninglessness of 'Asian American,' the absence of an identity anterior to naming." (149)
"What, finally, I think subjectlessness can help us to do is to articulate Asian American studies as an unbounded field, one that while in the structure of the academic institution is not structured by it." (151)
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities.(Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, H. Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, P. The Nation and its Fragments. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chuh, K and Shimikawa, K. Orientations (selections) (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Lowe, L. Immigrant Acts. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Palumbo-Liu, D. Asian/American (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Shohat, E. Stam, R. Unthinking Eurocentricism (selections) (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Trinh, T.When the Moon Waxes Red (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Wong, S. Denationalization Reconsidered (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Story and Discourse (Narrative)
Title
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Can I just reproduce the comprehensive diagram from the end of the book? No? Ok, fine. Chatman is interested in the form of narrative - this is his way of going about answering the question, What is Narrative? Also, he aims at a structure that might accomodate a wide swath of cases. He is deeply influenced by Genette, Barthes and of course, Aristotle. He is a structuralist. Ok then. So following Aristotle, all narratives must have a structure that invokes wholeness, transformation and self-regulation - this is how stuff makes sense to us, yeah? "Clearly narrative is a whole because it is constituted of elements - events and existents - that differ from what they constitute..self-regulation means the structure maintains and closes itself...the process by which a narrative event is expressed is its 'transformation'"(21) Narratives structures are semiotic - narrative signifieds are event, character and detail of setting. Narrative can never be complete (it can't be wholy accurate mimesis because the amount of stuff you'd have to imitate is infinite) Ok so Narrative is divided into two categories, Story and Discourse. Let's begin with Story (since Chatman does). Story - "the content or chain of events...plus existents." (19) This is made up of events which are either acts or happenings - changes of state. Convention is important in understanding this - versimillitude, motivation, etc. dictate how acts may follow one another to make a plot of a story - making it a chain of events, right? So then there is a hierarchy to these events - they are either big deals (kernels) or little deals (satellites). The situation of kernels and satelites dictates stuff like suspense and surprise, etc. Ok, also there is the issue of time. There is the time of the reader - discourse-time, and the time as it is unfolding in the plot - story-time. Chatman goes off of Genette's time analysis here and distinguishes the three categories that govern time in narrative as order, duration and frequency. Characters also have their own versions of time - character-NOW (the time the character is in the present of) and narrator-NOW (the moment of the story telling). This is all microstructure of narrative, but as for macrostructure, the general designs of plots as they stand now, well, it doesn't seem like Chatman is all in for it: "Perhaps the first observation to make about such taxonomies is that they rest on unacknowledged cultural presuppositions." (88) This is why he prefers the formal considerations of structuralism. So besides plot there were also existents to consider. The first one to consider is Story-space, easy in film, a bit harder in verbal narrative, where the reader must create it in the imagination through prompts from the narration. Then we have character, which Chatman believes has gotten a short shrift in narrative theory up until now.They are not secondary to the plot, or merely conjured in service of it, and they are open constructs, filled in by the reader and off the page. Characters have traits, characteristics that exist over the time of the narrative. "The setting 'sets a character off' in the usual figurative sense of te expression; it is the place and collection of objects 'against which' his actions and passions appropriately emerge."(139)
Ok now moving on to discourse, "the expression plane [of narrative which]...is a set of narrative statements." (146) I'm going to fake the diagram that Chatman produces to relation of reader, narrator, author, etc.
Real Author->[Implied Author->(Narrator)->(Narratee)->Implied Reader]->Real Reader. We need to realize this complication to discuss point of view and narrational strategy (the focus of the rest of the book). "The crucial difference between 'point of view' and narrative voice: point of view is the physical place or ideological situation or practical live-orientation to which narrative events stand in relation. Voice, on the contrary, refers to the speech or other overt means through which events and existents are communicated to the audience. Point of view does not mean expression; it only means the perspective in terms of which the expression is made. The perspective and the expression need not be lodged in the same person." (153) Then we get a discussion of speech acts and how they differ for narrators or characters. Characters speech acts are always within the story, hence freer because narratorial speech acts are bounded by the act of narrating. We then get a bunch of "nonnarrated" representations where the device we can assume is the stenographer. You have written records (like letters), dialogue (like a play, but not only like a play), soliloquy, interior monologue (not to be confused with stream of consciousness - but they are both "nonnarrated" sorta). The last chapter deals with a progression of forms of covert narration to overt narration. Here we have the issue of indirect (she said she had to go) and direct style (she had to go), indirect marking the narrator more than direct. Presupposition (close to what could be exposition in movies, i think) a covertish form of narration. Narration is always limited (this is presupposed by Aristotlean formation of narrative (start at the beginning, stop at the end, right?) The narrater can kinda covertly slip from one characters inner thoughts to another. Ok so more overt kinds of narration include, set descriptions (scenery and stuff), summarizing time, telling what character do NOT think, etc. Commentary is the final conveyance of the narrator's voice that Chatman discusses. Ironic commentary on the narrative is what the unrealiable narrator is based on. Oh wait, and he also talks about the narratee and the way he is invoked by the narrator. That's really all I have to say about that!
Keywords
Narrative, Open, Story, Discourse, Form, Content.
Other Thoughts
"We should not be disconcerted by the fact that texts are inevitably mixed; in that respect they resemble most organic objects."(18)
"The public demand for sequels and serials is not to be written off as naive Philistinism. It represents a legitimate desire, of theoretical interest, to extend the illusion, to find out how fate disposes of characters in whom we have come to invest emotion and interest." (134)
"Validity is not at issue: a fictional-character trait, as opposed to a real-person trait, can only be part of the narrative construct." (138)
Other QE Works Cited
Genette, Girard. Narrative Discourse
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text
Barthes, Roland. S/Z
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination
Aristotle. Poetics
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Can I just reproduce the comprehensive diagram from the end of the book? No? Ok, fine. Chatman is interested in the form of narrative - this is his way of going about answering the question, What is Narrative? Also, he aims at a structure that might accomodate a wide swath of cases. He is deeply influenced by Genette, Barthes and of course, Aristotle. He is a structuralist. Ok then. So following Aristotle, all narratives must have a structure that invokes wholeness, transformation and self-regulation - this is how stuff makes sense to us, yeah? "Clearly narrative is a whole because it is constituted of elements - events and existents - that differ from what they constitute..self-regulation means the structure maintains and closes itself...the process by which a narrative event is expressed is its 'transformation'"(21) Narratives structures are semiotic - narrative signifieds are event, character and detail of setting. Narrative can never be complete (it can't be wholy accurate mimesis because the amount of stuff you'd have to imitate is infinite) Ok so Narrative is divided into two categories, Story and Discourse. Let's begin with Story (since Chatman does). Story - "the content or chain of events...plus existents." (19) This is made up of events which are either acts or happenings - changes of state. Convention is important in understanding this - versimillitude, motivation, etc. dictate how acts may follow one another to make a plot of a story - making it a chain of events, right? So then there is a hierarchy to these events - they are either big deals (kernels) or little deals (satellites). The situation of kernels and satelites dictates stuff like suspense and surprise, etc. Ok, also there is the issue of time. There is the time of the reader - discourse-time, and the time as it is unfolding in the plot - story-time. Chatman goes off of Genette's time analysis here and distinguishes the three categories that govern time in narrative as order, duration and frequency. Characters also have their own versions of time - character-NOW (the time the character is in the present of) and narrator-NOW (the moment of the story telling). This is all microstructure of narrative, but as for macrostructure, the general designs of plots as they stand now, well, it doesn't seem like Chatman is all in for it: "Perhaps the first observation to make about such taxonomies is that they rest on unacknowledged cultural presuppositions." (88) This is why he prefers the formal considerations of structuralism. So besides plot there were also existents to consider. The first one to consider is Story-space, easy in film, a bit harder in verbal narrative, where the reader must create it in the imagination through prompts from the narration. Then we have character, which Chatman believes has gotten a short shrift in narrative theory up until now.They are not secondary to the plot, or merely conjured in service of it, and they are open constructs, filled in by the reader and off the page. Characters have traits, characteristics that exist over the time of the narrative. "The setting 'sets a character off' in the usual figurative sense of te expression; it is the place and collection of objects 'against which' his actions and passions appropriately emerge."(139)
Ok now moving on to discourse, "the expression plane [of narrative which]...is a set of narrative statements." (146) I'm going to fake the diagram that Chatman produces to relation of reader, narrator, author, etc.
Real Author->[Implied Author->(Narrator)->(Narratee)->Implied Reader]->Real Reader. We need to realize this complication to discuss point of view and narrational strategy (the focus of the rest of the book). "The crucial difference between 'point of view' and narrative voice: point of view is the physical place or ideological situation or practical live-orientation to which narrative events stand in relation. Voice, on the contrary, refers to the speech or other overt means through which events and existents are communicated to the audience. Point of view does not mean expression; it only means the perspective in terms of which the expression is made. The perspective and the expression need not be lodged in the same person." (153) Then we get a discussion of speech acts and how they differ for narrators or characters. Characters speech acts are always within the story, hence freer because narratorial speech acts are bounded by the act of narrating. We then get a bunch of "nonnarrated" representations where the device we can assume is the stenographer. You have written records (like letters), dialogue (like a play, but not only like a play), soliloquy, interior monologue (not to be confused with stream of consciousness - but they are both "nonnarrated" sorta). The last chapter deals with a progression of forms of covert narration to overt narration. Here we have the issue of indirect (she said she had to go) and direct style (she had to go), indirect marking the narrator more than direct. Presupposition (close to what could be exposition in movies, i think) a covertish form of narration. Narration is always limited (this is presupposed by Aristotlean formation of narrative (start at the beginning, stop at the end, right?) The narrater can kinda covertly slip from one characters inner thoughts to another. Ok so more overt kinds of narration include, set descriptions (scenery and stuff), summarizing time, telling what character do NOT think, etc. Commentary is the final conveyance of the narrator's voice that Chatman discusses. Ironic commentary on the narrative is what the unrealiable narrator is based on. Oh wait, and he also talks about the narratee and the way he is invoked by the narrator. That's really all I have to say about that!
Keywords
Narrative, Open, Story, Discourse, Form, Content.
Other Thoughts
"We should not be disconcerted by the fact that texts are inevitably mixed; in that respect they resemble most organic objects."(18)
"The public demand for sequels and serials is not to be written off as naive Philistinism. It represents a legitimate desire, of theoretical interest, to extend the illusion, to find out how fate disposes of characters in whom we have come to invest emotion and interest." (134)
"Validity is not at issue: a fictional-character trait, as opposed to a real-person trait, can only be part of the narrative construct." (138)
Other QE Works Cited
Genette, Girard. Narrative Discourse
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text
Barthes, Roland. S/Z
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination
Aristotle. Poetics
3.28.2006
Medical Theory, Surgical Practice (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Lawrence, Christopher (ed.). Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery. London: Routledge, 1992.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This collection of essays on "the relation of surgical practice to medical theories of the body" (x) is more like a historical corrective on major figures and themes in surgical history. Also of note is the concern that several of the essays pay to the specialization of surgery and its separation from other branches of medicine (and its susequent division into specialities - all this is rather taken for granted in current ideas of medical practice, but it is crucial to see how surgery came to be understood as such from being something affiliated with the barbers guild back in the middle ages.)
"Democratic, Divine and Heoric: The History and Historiography of Surgery" Christopher Lawrence: In this essay, Lawrence examines the way the trope of the Heroic surgeon was developed in Anglo-American history. "Where Renaissance surgeons found the source of their self-esteem and identity in newly translated ancient texts, English surgeons of the Enlightenment grounded their claims for recognition in their recent empirically acquired knowledge of anatomy, of operative techniques and of instrument design." (5) "Victorian histories of surgery began to use the Romantic language of the heroic, individual struggle which had increasingly appeared in the literature of science." (7) The breakthrough usage of antiseptic also expanded the view of the surgeon as hero, allowing him ever more province into the human body. Lawrence also discusses why surgery has eluded serious scholarship - it has been so successful in its teleological philosophy of progress that it doesn't get questioned too much. He brings in Tempkin (a very important figure in the historiography of medicine) who posited in the 50s that the disease doesn't always dictate treatment, but the constructedness that allows the treatment to predicate our understanding of disease. Anyway, by the 19th C, surgery and manliness (like the expansion into the West, so the expansion into the body) became linked. "What is the relation between the rise of surgery and the constitution of the body as an array of objects of surgical knowledge? After all the way in which we know the body in western medicine to a great extent implies the possibility of surgical intervention. Surgical practice is not simply the result of bodily knowledge. Bodily knowledge made by surgeons has built into it the possibility of surgical practice." (34)
"Seventeenth-century English Surgery: The Casebook of Joseph Binns" Lucinda McCray Beier: This essay takes as its source material the clinical notebooks of Joseph Binns, a very unremarkable surgeon in mid-17th Century Britain. It's goal is to examine the day-to-day practice of surgery. He treated rashes, boils, tumors, STDs,set bones, etc. While at this time there was a clear break (enforced by the Guild) between Surgeons and Physicians (who could prescribe internal medicines) these notebooks show that even unremarkable, respectable surgeons like Binns crossed this line all the time. "It clearly demonstrates that, for the most part, Binn's practice did deal with what was designated as the surgeon's domain: external disorders. But, like other surgeons and apothecaries of the day, he was prepared to treat internal diseases. Likewise, the casebook shows that Binns depened upon both theory and epiricism in his approach to treatment. His therapeutic regimes were governed by humoral theory. However, long experience of remedies and surgical procedures, combined with trial and error, influenced the courses of treatment he conducted." (81)
"Surgery and Scrophula" Roger French: This essay examines "what doctors and surgeons say and meant when they used the term 'scrophula' and how their picture of it was constructed." "Scrophula" was a term for tuberculosis used in the 17th-18th C, but disappeared from medical vocabulary and wasn't linked with TB until much later. This essay argues that its identification as the King's Evil (it could be cured by the touch of the King) made it's visibility (referenceability) contingent on anti-regency politics in Britain and France.
"Giovanni Battista Morgagni and Eighteenth-century Physical Examination" Malcolm Nicolson: This essay is another case study of a physician, this time a really famous one, to discuss a particular day-to-day activity - bed side manner. Further, as the previous essay, this contends that the physician also used many of the techniques of the surgeon, in practice, blurring the supposed clear demarcation between the two that existed at the time. This is evinced by the fact that while the physician had to respect the rules of decorum at the time (in terms of touching the body), he did palpate, percuss, and auscultate the body. "The aim of the new diagnostic procedures was to anatomise the living, to see the structural effects of disease at the bedside. The new conception of pathology thus gave physical examination primary significance." (123)
"Physiological Principles in the Surgical Writings of John Hunter" Stephen Jacyna:
This essay looks at the much studied influencial 19th C surgeon, John Hunter, but tries to discuss the undertheorized ways in which Hunter use bio-medical knowledge affected his conception of surgery. First off, for Hunter, "bodily actions [are] pervaded by teleology." (138) "Hunter saw the surgeon as acting - ideally - in co-operation with the body's own intelligence." (141) There is a return to nature and the province of the natural over the body - but a nature that is designed for the healthy progress of the body.
"Practicing on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease" Christopher Lawrence and Richard Dixey: This essay contests the widely held notion that Joseph Lister and his followers represent the sole (or at least) main causes for the revolution of modern surgery through their studies and work on sepsis. The essay maintains that Lister and his group took on the modifications made to their initial theories as their own and posited themselves as the originators of those theories of inflammation and sepsis.
""From Conservative to Radical Surgery in Late Nineteenth-century America" Gert H. Brieger: This essay examines the way conservative surgery became radical surgery (at the expense of heroic surgery). Conservative surgery refers to the preservative nature of surgery - it preserves the body in life. Radical surgery attempts to cure the patient completey of the disease (not really what you thought - see it isn't the procedure that makes it radical - it is the intent - thus, the progression from conservative to radical isn't really that weird). What was shunned was heroic surgery - invasive surgeory to show the surgeon's testing of medicine's limits.
"Knowledge of Bodies or Bodies of Knowledge? Surgeons, Anatomists and Rectal Surgery, 1830-1985" Lindsay Granshaw: This essay is on the history of the growth of a specialty - rectal surgeons actively differentiated themselves as experts in terms of curing fistulas, and advised that patients not go to private physicians or quacks for cures. This was based in part on their insistence that they better knew the anatomy of the rectum than others. As such, this led to quite different envisionings of how the external sphincter worked that wasn't resolved until the mid 19th C. " Anatomists and clinicians both form part of the medical profession, yet, as the case of rectal surgery and anatomy illustrates, their approaches, and their theoretical and practical concerns have always been and in many ways are quite different...Bodies of knowledge did not equate with knowledge of bodies." (258)
"Experiment and Experience in Anaesthesia: Alfred Goodman Levy and Chloroform Death, 1910 - 1960" Christopher Lawrence: Why didn't physcians care that Alfred Levy had discovered that chloroform could cause death? We have again the division across fields of knowledge - clinicians felt that their work "on the ground" was not comparable to work done in labrotories by scientists on cats and dogs. But yeah, the cat dog people were right, it totally killed people and then they had to stop using it.
"The Amibiguous Artifact: Surgical Instruments and the Surgical Past" Ghislane Lawrence: This essay calls for a history of surgical instruments. It warns against relying too much on mere representation of old artifacts as simple, transparent truth - much like Sander Gilman does in his book. An interesting example is given - we shouldn't assume that a blade's purpose is so transparent (it is to cut, right?) but why, how, etc. is it different that a knife (say to cut a turkey?) "A history of surgery more concerned with the everyday practice of users and makers may well prove more productive when the complexity of old instruments as historical resources is recognized." (311)
Lawrence, Christopher (ed.). Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery. London: Routledge, 1992.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This collection of essays on "the relation of surgical practice to medical theories of the body" (x) is more like a historical corrective on major figures and themes in surgical history. Also of note is the concern that several of the essays pay to the specialization of surgery and its separation from other branches of medicine (and its susequent division into specialities - all this is rather taken for granted in current ideas of medical practice, but it is crucial to see how surgery came to be understood as such from being something affiliated with the barbers guild back in the middle ages.)
"Democratic, Divine and Heoric: The History and Historiography of Surgery" Christopher Lawrence: In this essay, Lawrence examines the way the trope of the Heroic surgeon was developed in Anglo-American history. "Where Renaissance surgeons found the source of their self-esteem and identity in newly translated ancient texts, English surgeons of the Enlightenment grounded their claims for recognition in their recent empirically acquired knowledge of anatomy, of operative techniques and of instrument design." (5) "Victorian histories of surgery began to use the Romantic language of the heroic, individual struggle which had increasingly appeared in the literature of science." (7) The breakthrough usage of antiseptic also expanded the view of the surgeon as hero, allowing him ever more province into the human body. Lawrence also discusses why surgery has eluded serious scholarship - it has been so successful in its teleological philosophy of progress that it doesn't get questioned too much. He brings in Tempkin (a very important figure in the historiography of medicine) who posited in the 50s that the disease doesn't always dictate treatment, but the constructedness that allows the treatment to predicate our understanding of disease. Anyway, by the 19th C, surgery and manliness (like the expansion into the West, so the expansion into the body) became linked. "What is the relation between the rise of surgery and the constitution of the body as an array of objects of surgical knowledge? After all the way in which we know the body in western medicine to a great extent implies the possibility of surgical intervention. Surgical practice is not simply the result of bodily knowledge. Bodily knowledge made by surgeons has built into it the possibility of surgical practice." (34)
"Seventeenth-century English Surgery: The Casebook of Joseph Binns" Lucinda McCray Beier: This essay takes as its source material the clinical notebooks of Joseph Binns, a very unremarkable surgeon in mid-17th Century Britain. It's goal is to examine the day-to-day practice of surgery. He treated rashes, boils, tumors, STDs,set bones, etc. While at this time there was a clear break (enforced by the Guild) between Surgeons and Physicians (who could prescribe internal medicines) these notebooks show that even unremarkable, respectable surgeons like Binns crossed this line all the time. "It clearly demonstrates that, for the most part, Binn's practice did deal with what was designated as the surgeon's domain: external disorders. But, like other surgeons and apothecaries of the day, he was prepared to treat internal diseases. Likewise, the casebook shows that Binns depened upon both theory and epiricism in his approach to treatment. His therapeutic regimes were governed by humoral theory. However, long experience of remedies and surgical procedures, combined with trial and error, influenced the courses of treatment he conducted." (81)
"Surgery and Scrophula" Roger French: This essay examines "what doctors and surgeons say and meant when they used the term 'scrophula' and how their picture of it was constructed." "Scrophula" was a term for tuberculosis used in the 17th-18th C, but disappeared from medical vocabulary and wasn't linked with TB until much later. This essay argues that its identification as the King's Evil (it could be cured by the touch of the King) made it's visibility (referenceability) contingent on anti-regency politics in Britain and France.
"Giovanni Battista Morgagni and Eighteenth-century Physical Examination" Malcolm Nicolson: This essay is another case study of a physician, this time a really famous one, to discuss a particular day-to-day activity - bed side manner. Further, as the previous essay, this contends that the physician also used many of the techniques of the surgeon, in practice, blurring the supposed clear demarcation between the two that existed at the time. This is evinced by the fact that while the physician had to respect the rules of decorum at the time (in terms of touching the body), he did palpate, percuss, and auscultate the body. "The aim of the new diagnostic procedures was to anatomise the living, to see the structural effects of disease at the bedside. The new conception of pathology thus gave physical examination primary significance." (123)
"Physiological Principles in the Surgical Writings of John Hunter" Stephen Jacyna:
This essay looks at the much studied influencial 19th C surgeon, John Hunter, but tries to discuss the undertheorized ways in which Hunter use bio-medical knowledge affected his conception of surgery. First off, for Hunter, "bodily actions [are] pervaded by teleology." (138) "Hunter saw the surgeon as acting - ideally - in co-operation with the body's own intelligence." (141) There is a return to nature and the province of the natural over the body - but a nature that is designed for the healthy progress of the body.
"Practicing on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease" Christopher Lawrence and Richard Dixey: This essay contests the widely held notion that Joseph Lister and his followers represent the sole (or at least) main causes for the revolution of modern surgery through their studies and work on sepsis. The essay maintains that Lister and his group took on the modifications made to their initial theories as their own and posited themselves as the originators of those theories of inflammation and sepsis.
""From Conservative to Radical Surgery in Late Nineteenth-century America" Gert H. Brieger: This essay examines the way conservative surgery became radical surgery (at the expense of heroic surgery). Conservative surgery refers to the preservative nature of surgery - it preserves the body in life. Radical surgery attempts to cure the patient completey of the disease (not really what you thought - see it isn't the procedure that makes it radical - it is the intent - thus, the progression from conservative to radical isn't really that weird). What was shunned was heroic surgery - invasive surgeory to show the surgeon's testing of medicine's limits.
"Knowledge of Bodies or Bodies of Knowledge? Surgeons, Anatomists and Rectal Surgery, 1830-1985" Lindsay Granshaw: This essay is on the history of the growth of a specialty - rectal surgeons actively differentiated themselves as experts in terms of curing fistulas, and advised that patients not go to private physicians or quacks for cures. This was based in part on their insistence that they better knew the anatomy of the rectum than others. As such, this led to quite different envisionings of how the external sphincter worked that wasn't resolved until the mid 19th C. " Anatomists and clinicians both form part of the medical profession, yet, as the case of rectal surgery and anatomy illustrates, their approaches, and their theoretical and practical concerns have always been and in many ways are quite different...Bodies of knowledge did not equate with knowledge of bodies." (258)
"Experiment and Experience in Anaesthesia: Alfred Goodman Levy and Chloroform Death, 1910 - 1960" Christopher Lawrence: Why didn't physcians care that Alfred Levy had discovered that chloroform could cause death? We have again the division across fields of knowledge - clinicians felt that their work "on the ground" was not comparable to work done in labrotories by scientists on cats and dogs. But yeah, the cat dog people were right, it totally killed people and then they had to stop using it.
"The Amibiguous Artifact: Surgical Instruments and the Surgical Past" Ghislane Lawrence: This essay calls for a history of surgical instruments. It warns against relying too much on mere representation of old artifacts as simple, transparent truth - much like Sander Gilman does in his book. An interesting example is given - we shouldn't assume that a blade's purpose is so transparent (it is to cut, right?) but why, how, etc. is it different that a knife (say to cut a turkey?) "A history of surgery more concerned with the everyday practice of users and makers may well prove more productive when the complexity of old instruments as historical resources is recognized." (311)
3.27.2006
Picturing Health and Illness (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Sander Gilman considers the project of this book to consider the images of health and illness, so often ignored in the writing of the history of medicine, particularly taking note of the ways in which health is figured as beauty and illness is figured as ugliness. He begins by noting the four major roles of visual images for historians of medicine - the first is the use of images as illustrative of illness. These images assume a transparency that is manipulative - "The assumption is that the narrative is complete rather than partial (as all narratives must be) and that the images provide 'representative' or 'unmediated access to the material world of the narrative." (15) The second is closely linked to the first, except it relies upon the photograph as "a 'real' window into realities of the past." (ibid) "The third model for the use of images stresses the artistic medium itself and the internal iconographic tradition of the work of art." (16) "The fourth way of employing visual materials in the writing of the history of medicine is to make the image itself the subject of the analysis of cultural fantasies of health, disease, and the body." (18) "What has heretofore been avoided is the idea of multiple, simultaneous meanings, the very ambiguity that is inherent to visual images, no matter what their venue." (19) In the second chapter, Gilman looks at images produced in the four ways described above that depict the mentally ill as a means of identifying from the outside (in terms of beauty or ugliness) what is pathological on the inside (sane or insane). "All [representations of the mentally ill in this chapter] control the images and the range of interpretation, whether those limits are contextualized in the discussion of the images or present in the very structure of the image itself. Yet each representation provides the viewer with multiple, simultaneous meanings that need to be controlled just as much as does the anxiety about identifying oneself with the image of the mad. As we picture health and illness, we bring to the images an entire arsenal of aesthetic associations, and we see the world in terms of beauty and ugliness. The associations provide a means of placing ourselves as observers not only of these images but of our own bodies, bodies inherently in danger of illness." (50) The next chapter furthers this argument, maintaining that not only is the diseased ugly, but the ugly is diseased. Gilman furthers this argument with discussions of racial inferiority base on appearance, etc. "The healthy is the beautiful, is the erotic, is the good, for it leads to the preservation and continuation of the collective. This is the norm against which the deviant is to be measured. The deviant is ill and is therefore ugly and evil...The ugliness of the deviant may be overtly evident upon first glance, may appear over time, or may be evident only to the 'trained eye' of the physician/aesthetician...there are no intermediate or transitional stages, only masks that are lifted to reveal the antithesis of the healthy."(66) The next chapter starts the close readings, more specific than the over all theme posited in the first three chapters. This chapter is on the Phantom of the Opera and his lack of a nose, particularly ugly/unhealthy as its mark of syphilitic body. He also discusses the advent of plastic surgery, especially in relation to the desire to erase racial difference as ugliness (ie the Jewish nose).
The next chapter is a reading of Mark Twain's writing on Jews and Anti-Semiticism. While Twain does locate the cause of Jewish ugliness/illness not upon race or space but upon oppression, he does transform this rhetoric of physical illnes into "the rhetoric about psychological predisposition...Twain sees the diseases of the Jews as markers for the Jews' difference, but also for the difference which they (as individuals who have experienced death and disease in their own world) see in themselves. An yet, in his own estimation, he is not as 'ill' as the Jews and that redeems him."(114) The last chapter examines several public health posters on AIDS. "All of these aestheticized images attempt to simplify the lived complexity of disease through the use of highly constructed visual images." (115) He notes that the ill/ugly body is very rarely used in these posters. "The setting or some other external sign, rather than the ill person's body, is used to evoke the disease."(148) "Rarely is the figure of Death as an abstraction replaced by representations (even symbolic representations) of a dead body...The 'beautiful' remains the transnational sign for the healthy and the 'ugly' is banished from this world of images. Yet hidden within the images of the beautiful is the potential for death. Death comes to be limited as the beautiful body moves to its antithesis without the process of dying. Death itself comes to be aestheticized. All thse images are images not of education, but of control." (162) Gilman concludes not by giving any definite answers and asserting that his project was provacative and incomplete in the selective nature of the images he chooses to examine. He provocatively gestures to smell as opposed to sight as the sense through which we might be able to better confront the constructedness of the images we consume of illness to reassure ourselves of our own bodily integrity and the abeyance of death. "Disease is not solely seen in the Other; tis 'stench' fills our nostrils and floods our imagination. It does not respect the nice, clean boundary that we have attributed to the sense of sight." (178)
Keywords
Health, Illness, Representation, Image, Beauty, Ugliness, Aesthetic
Other Thoughts
"The anxieties about illness are replaced by control over the image. As we shall see in this study, the images can seem to be controlled, while the 'illnesses' constructed seem always to be beyond control. This anxiety is played out in the world of representations for historians and for readers, as it is sager and more controlled that the world of illness, real or imagined. To do so it is necessary to control the multiple, simultaneous meanings of visual representations and to focus on a seemingly concrete, single interpretation. This book will attempt to open up a set of images that represent health and illness and show how the problem of simultaneity complicates the interprestation of such images." (32)
"Sexuality and the aesthetic are closely linked to the question of the beautiful, the truly healthy. While there are some limitations to the notion of the beautiful...in general, our desire is to limit the diseased to the world of the ugly. The ugly is anti-erotic rather than merely unaesthetic. It is denied the ability to reproduce." (92)
"Here we have a very modern project - the telling of multiple tales about a single object- that reveals some of the permanence of the anxieties of our age in regard to the body and to the memory of the body from the past. While we recognize the potential for such multiple tales, we still struggle to find the one that is 'true.' For flux is disturbing, permanence reassuring, even in the telling of stories. The ultimate flux that is combated in our telling of stories is the flux experienced in our sensing the transience of our lives and bodies. This is the reason we compulsively tell tales about health and illness; it is in these tales that we come closest to articulating the anxieties we have about our own mortality. These tales are as much present in the culture of medicine as in that of art." (175)
Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Sander Gilman considers the project of this book to consider the images of health and illness, so often ignored in the writing of the history of medicine, particularly taking note of the ways in which health is figured as beauty and illness is figured as ugliness. He begins by noting the four major roles of visual images for historians of medicine - the first is the use of images as illustrative of illness. These images assume a transparency that is manipulative - "The assumption is that the narrative is complete rather than partial (as all narratives must be) and that the images provide 'representative' or 'unmediated access to the material world of the narrative." (15) The second is closely linked to the first, except it relies upon the photograph as "a 'real' window into realities of the past." (ibid) "The third model for the use of images stresses the artistic medium itself and the internal iconographic tradition of the work of art." (16) "The fourth way of employing visual materials in the writing of the history of medicine is to make the image itself the subject of the analysis of cultural fantasies of health, disease, and the body." (18) "What has heretofore been avoided is the idea of multiple, simultaneous meanings, the very ambiguity that is inherent to visual images, no matter what their venue." (19) In the second chapter, Gilman looks at images produced in the four ways described above that depict the mentally ill as a means of identifying from the outside (in terms of beauty or ugliness) what is pathological on the inside (sane or insane). "All [representations of the mentally ill in this chapter] control the images and the range of interpretation, whether those limits are contextualized in the discussion of the images or present in the very structure of the image itself. Yet each representation provides the viewer with multiple, simultaneous meanings that need to be controlled just as much as does the anxiety about identifying oneself with the image of the mad. As we picture health and illness, we bring to the images an entire arsenal of aesthetic associations, and we see the world in terms of beauty and ugliness. The associations provide a means of placing ourselves as observers not only of these images but of our own bodies, bodies inherently in danger of illness." (50) The next chapter furthers this argument, maintaining that not only is the diseased ugly, but the ugly is diseased. Gilman furthers this argument with discussions of racial inferiority base on appearance, etc. "The healthy is the beautiful, is the erotic, is the good, for it leads to the preservation and continuation of the collective. This is the norm against which the deviant is to be measured. The deviant is ill and is therefore ugly and evil...The ugliness of the deviant may be overtly evident upon first glance, may appear over time, or may be evident only to the 'trained eye' of the physician/aesthetician...there are no intermediate or transitional stages, only masks that are lifted to reveal the antithesis of the healthy."(66) The next chapter starts the close readings, more specific than the over all theme posited in the first three chapters. This chapter is on the Phantom of the Opera and his lack of a nose, particularly ugly/unhealthy as its mark of syphilitic body. He also discusses the advent of plastic surgery, especially in relation to the desire to erase racial difference as ugliness (ie the Jewish nose).
The next chapter is a reading of Mark Twain's writing on Jews and Anti-Semiticism. While Twain does locate the cause of Jewish ugliness/illness not upon race or space but upon oppression, he does transform this rhetoric of physical illnes into "the rhetoric about psychological predisposition...Twain sees the diseases of the Jews as markers for the Jews' difference, but also for the difference which they (as individuals who have experienced death and disease in their own world) see in themselves. An yet, in his own estimation, he is not as 'ill' as the Jews and that redeems him."(114) The last chapter examines several public health posters on AIDS. "All of these aestheticized images attempt to simplify the lived complexity of disease through the use of highly constructed visual images." (115) He notes that the ill/ugly body is very rarely used in these posters. "The setting or some other external sign, rather than the ill person's body, is used to evoke the disease."(148) "Rarely is the figure of Death as an abstraction replaced by representations (even symbolic representations) of a dead body...The 'beautiful' remains the transnational sign for the healthy and the 'ugly' is banished from this world of images. Yet hidden within the images of the beautiful is the potential for death. Death comes to be limited as the beautiful body moves to its antithesis without the process of dying. Death itself comes to be aestheticized. All thse images are images not of education, but of control." (162) Gilman concludes not by giving any definite answers and asserting that his project was provacative and incomplete in the selective nature of the images he chooses to examine. He provocatively gestures to smell as opposed to sight as the sense through which we might be able to better confront the constructedness of the images we consume of illness to reassure ourselves of our own bodily integrity and the abeyance of death. "Disease is not solely seen in the Other; tis 'stench' fills our nostrils and floods our imagination. It does not respect the nice, clean boundary that we have attributed to the sense of sight." (178)
Keywords
Health, Illness, Representation, Image, Beauty, Ugliness, Aesthetic
Other Thoughts
"The anxieties about illness are replaced by control over the image. As we shall see in this study, the images can seem to be controlled, while the 'illnesses' constructed seem always to be beyond control. This anxiety is played out in the world of representations for historians and for readers, as it is sager and more controlled that the world of illness, real or imagined. To do so it is necessary to control the multiple, simultaneous meanings of visual representations and to focus on a seemingly concrete, single interpretation. This book will attempt to open up a set of images that represent health and illness and show how the problem of simultaneity complicates the interprestation of such images." (32)
"Sexuality and the aesthetic are closely linked to the question of the beautiful, the truly healthy. While there are some limitations to the notion of the beautiful...in general, our desire is to limit the diseased to the world of the ugly. The ugly is anti-erotic rather than merely unaesthetic. It is denied the ability to reproduce." (92)
"Here we have a very modern project - the telling of multiple tales about a single object- that reveals some of the permanence of the anxieties of our age in regard to the body and to the memory of the body from the past. While we recognize the potential for such multiple tales, we still struggle to find the one that is 'true.' For flux is disturbing, permanence reassuring, even in the telling of stories. The ultimate flux that is combated in our telling of stories is the flux experienced in our sensing the transience of our lives and bodies. This is the reason we compulsively tell tales about health and illness; it is in these tales that we come closest to articulating the anxieties we have about our own mortality. These tales are as much present in the culture of medicine as in that of art." (175)
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3 (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This third volume of the Zone series, "brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling that function the organ of a larger body - the social body or the universe as a whole." (11)
"Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages" Jacques Le Goff: This short essay aims to emphasize "the potentia; contribution to be made by research into the application of bodily metaphors to politics and to suggest several lines of investigation." (13) In this it pretty much follows the line of the subtitle of the essay, ulitmately concluding that the head remains the cheif metaphor for the body politic.
"The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle" David Kunzle:An insanely exhaustive study of the visual representations of dentistry and teeth pulling in the 17th and 19th C. Europe. At first teeth pulling pictures showed poor people and mean dentists. Dentists were seen as charlatans or quacks. Teeth pulling was a public spectacle. By the 19th C, good dentist was distinguished from bad, good being properly trained. Dentistry became a private practice - but the dentist still remained a figure that abused his power, wielded through pain that claims to relieves pain. "The symbolic or substitute revenge of art [on dentists] served to release otherwise dangerous frustration, fear and anger, which, I have argue, were social and political as well as personal." (83)
"'Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" Thomas W. Lacquer: All about the Clitoris! A history of the clitoris that contests the suppose discovery of it at any point in time - it was always part of female sexuality, orgasm, etc. The other point is "there is nothing natural about how the clitoris is construed." (92)
"Subtle Bodies" Giulia Sissa: I found this essay's argument hard to follow. That being said, it seems to be about positing Artificial Insemination procedures as a tool to uncork the ways in which the conception of virginity and the womb and the potency of semen have been seen since antiquity. "Women bear children, but men make them. The links of filiation are made and undone by men since it is they who are empowered to recognize, disown and adopt." (134) "The role of donated semes is simply that of an agent of fecundity. The identity of the genitor is not sought; all that matters is that he should be as much like the father as possible so that even the memory of that other body should not be detectable on the body of the child. It is perhaps by expunging the memory of the real link between the semen in the test tube and the child which it produces that the process of AID is made acceptable." (135)
"Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship" Francoise Hertier-Auge: This essay comparatively links the conception of blood and semen across cultures and from antiquity to modernity to show the sophistication of early conceptions of blood and semen in terms of how close they are to modern scientific notions and also how similar these theories are even when coming from diverse cultures. "Sperm and marrow are of the same nature and contain the germ of life, stored away like kernels, and jealously protected in the hard parts of the body...Semen that has to be constantly renewed must be stored away somewhere inside the body; the tightly sealed bone capsules are the ideal place for it. At the core of the belief, what we find is matter." (174)
"Note on the Garbha-Upanisad" Lakshmi Kapani: This is a short note on the "Upanisad of the Embryo" which poses the question of "where this new individual [the embryo] is situated within the complex network of influence."(187) The Upanisad consists of the following network of parts: "the body's constitution and psychophysiology; the stages of embryonic and fetal development up until the eighth month; an aetiology of malformations; embryology and soteriology, the ninth month and birth; the corerelations between parts of the body and elements of sacrifice; and a brief anatomical recapitulation." (185)
"Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors" Bruce M. Knauft: This is a written and photographic anthropological study of the Gebusi of South New Guinea, focusing on "aspects of Melanesian body imagery and custom which were well established prior to Western intervention and pacification." (199) "Cultural conceptions of the body, being so merged with the reality of bodily perception and experience, seem uniquely natural and basic. While the body is eminently 'natural,' it is just this perception of naturalness that allows culturally variable concepts of the body to be so fundamentally ingrained in the collective psyche. In fact, images of the body everywhere embody social and cultural form." (201) "The body is Melanesia is intricately tied to cycles of fertility, depletion and regeneration...these processes tend to be linked as complementary parts of a single cosmological universe and to be instantiated through a holistic bodily economy...Melanesian cultural systems have always grown and changed in a dialectical and inconsistent fashion." (255)
"Older Women, Stout-Hearted Women, Women of Substance" Francoise Heritier-Auge: "Can one say that male domination is universal? If so, what is the origin, the explanation for this fundamental inequality between the sexes?" (282) "Because...the raw material of the symbolic is the body - the prime place for the observation of sensory data...I would propose that the reason for this [hunters being more valued than gatherers] is possibly a feature anchored in the female body...What man values in man, then, is not doubt his ability to bleed, to risk his life, to take that of others, by his own free will; the woman 'sees' her blood flowing from her body...and she produces life without necessarily wanting to do so or being able to prevent it. In her body she periodically experiences, for a time that has a beginning and an end, changes of which she is not the mistress, and which she cannot prevent. It is in this relation to blood that we may perhaps find the fundamental impetus for all the symbolic elaboration, at the outset, on the relations between the sexes." (298)
"Personal Status and Sexual Practice in the Roman Empire" Aline Rousselle: This essay examines sexual behavior based on social status in the Roman Empire, men of position, women of position, slave women and slave men. "One simply did not feel the same emotions and desires for individuals of different statuses." (322)
"The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea" Thomas W. Laquer: Prostitution and Masturbation! "My general point is that talk about sex is about a great deal else than organs, bodies and pleasures." (335)So this is on the connection between the sexual and the social body. "While masturbation threatened to take sexual desire and pleasure inward, away from the family, prostitution took it outward...The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs...The paradoxes of commercial society that had already plagued Adam Smith and his colleagues, the nagging doubts that a free market economy can in fact sustain the social body, haunt the sexual body. Or, the other way around, the perverted sexual body haunts society and reminds it of its fragility." (340)
"The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend" Catherine Gallagher: Examines through a reading of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend "a pervasive pattern in mid-Victorian thought...that economic value can only be determined in close relationship to bodily well being."(346) Also a little bit about the reaction to the gloomy economists, Malthus, etc. "The attempt to resituate the human body at the center of economic concerns, to rewrite economic discourse so that it constantly referred back to the body's well-being, paradoxically, itself tended to do what it accused unreconstructed political economists of doing: separating value from flesh and blood, conditioning value on a state of suspended animation or apparent death." (347)
"The Meaning of Sacrifice" Christian Duverger: This is an essay on Aztec human sacrifice. Human beings were thought to have an excess of life force, life energy, ritual murder a way of storing energy because in natural death this extra energy was wasted. "The sacrifice was not the result of some inhuman, gratuitous barbarism. It was essentially a technology.
"The Sacrificial Body of the King" Luc de Heusch:This essay is on the role of the sacrificial king in Africa, a king destined for sacrifice. It tells of the "ambivalence toward the royal body...the people condemn the king to death for his very excesses." (389) "Sacred royalty is a symbolic structure that has broken with the domestic, familiar or linear order. It is a machination, a topological arrangement, which must be read as a meshing of human space and the space of the bush or forest in which the mysterious forces responsible for fecundity dwell; it can also be the bond that joins the earth and sky." (393)
"The Emperor-God's Other Body" Florence Dupont: This essay examines the rootedness of the idea of the monarch having two bodies - "one human, the other divine...the king is the conjunction of a private, human body and a political, divine body..." (397) - in the funeral rites of Roman emperors. "The sovereign was attributed a body that allowed him to straddle the two spaces, human and divine. He had a double body that divided when he died, yielding two bodies, one for men, one for the gods. It was his divine body that governed, present among men by virtue of the flesh, its material support. To avoid tyranny, the Romans invented an immortal imago, the divine body of absolute power." (418)
"The Body-of-Power and Incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal OR of the Figurability of the Political Absolute" Louis Marin: This essay compares representations of the royal and divine body - the King and Christ. "One of these paths [to claim reign] is the process of figurability of the body-of-power: contemplate the divine body of suffering that, by its very dereliction, is the infinite body of love; contemplate it in the profane body of represented royal majesty, its portrait; contemplate, that is, examine on the spot the infinite distance of the difference of the one in the other."(446)
"Mapping the Body" Mark Kidel and Susan Rowe-Leete: Really awesome collection of images of mappings of the body, from all over the world, with pithy little quotes running alongside them.
"A Repertory of Body History" Barbara Duden: A partially annotated biography "dealing with the perceived body and the perceptual milieu."
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This third volume of the Zone series, "brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling that function the organ of a larger body - the social body or the universe as a whole." (11)
"Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages" Jacques Le Goff: This short essay aims to emphasize "the potentia; contribution to be made by research into the application of bodily metaphors to politics and to suggest several lines of investigation." (13) In this it pretty much follows the line of the subtitle of the essay, ulitmately concluding that the head remains the cheif metaphor for the body politic.
"The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle" David Kunzle:An insanely exhaustive study of the visual representations of dentistry and teeth pulling in the 17th and 19th C. Europe. At first teeth pulling pictures showed poor people and mean dentists. Dentists were seen as charlatans or quacks. Teeth pulling was a public spectacle. By the 19th C, good dentist was distinguished from bad, good being properly trained. Dentistry became a private practice - but the dentist still remained a figure that abused his power, wielded through pain that claims to relieves pain. "The symbolic or substitute revenge of art [on dentists] served to release otherwise dangerous frustration, fear and anger, which, I have argue, were social and political as well as personal." (83)
"'Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" Thomas W. Lacquer: All about the Clitoris! A history of the clitoris that contests the suppose discovery of it at any point in time - it was always part of female sexuality, orgasm, etc. The other point is "there is nothing natural about how the clitoris is construed." (92)
"Subtle Bodies" Giulia Sissa: I found this essay's argument hard to follow. That being said, it seems to be about positing Artificial Insemination procedures as a tool to uncork the ways in which the conception of virginity and the womb and the potency of semen have been seen since antiquity. "Women bear children, but men make them. The links of filiation are made and undone by men since it is they who are empowered to recognize, disown and adopt." (134) "The role of donated semes is simply that of an agent of fecundity. The identity of the genitor is not sought; all that matters is that he should be as much like the father as possible so that even the memory of that other body should not be detectable on the body of the child. It is perhaps by expunging the memory of the real link between the semen in the test tube and the child which it produces that the process of AID is made acceptable." (135)
"Semen and Blood: Some Ancient Theories Concerning Their Genesis and Relationship" Francoise Hertier-Auge: This essay comparatively links the conception of blood and semen across cultures and from antiquity to modernity to show the sophistication of early conceptions of blood and semen in terms of how close they are to modern scientific notions and also how similar these theories are even when coming from diverse cultures. "Sperm and marrow are of the same nature and contain the germ of life, stored away like kernels, and jealously protected in the hard parts of the body...Semen that has to be constantly renewed must be stored away somewhere inside the body; the tightly sealed bone capsules are the ideal place for it. At the core of the belief, what we find is matter." (174)
"Note on the Garbha-Upanisad" Lakshmi Kapani: This is a short note on the "Upanisad of the Embryo" which poses the question of "where this new individual [the embryo] is situated within the complex network of influence."(187) The Upanisad consists of the following network of parts: "the body's constitution and psychophysiology; the stages of embryonic and fetal development up until the eighth month; an aetiology of malformations; embryology and soteriology, the ninth month and birth; the corerelations between parts of the body and elements of sacrifice; and a brief anatomical recapitulation." (185)
"Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors" Bruce M. Knauft: This is a written and photographic anthropological study of the Gebusi of South New Guinea, focusing on "aspects of Melanesian body imagery and custom which were well established prior to Western intervention and pacification." (199) "Cultural conceptions of the body, being so merged with the reality of bodily perception and experience, seem uniquely natural and basic. While the body is eminently 'natural,' it is just this perception of naturalness that allows culturally variable concepts of the body to be so fundamentally ingrained in the collective psyche. In fact, images of the body everywhere embody social and cultural form." (201) "The body is Melanesia is intricately tied to cycles of fertility, depletion and regeneration...these processes tend to be linked as complementary parts of a single cosmological universe and to be instantiated through a holistic bodily economy...Melanesian cultural systems have always grown and changed in a dialectical and inconsistent fashion." (255)
"Older Women, Stout-Hearted Women, Women of Substance" Francoise Heritier-Auge: "Can one say that male domination is universal? If so, what is the origin, the explanation for this fundamental inequality between the sexes?" (282) "Because...the raw material of the symbolic is the body - the prime place for the observation of sensory data...I would propose that the reason for this [hunters being more valued than gatherers] is possibly a feature anchored in the female body...What man values in man, then, is not doubt his ability to bleed, to risk his life, to take that of others, by his own free will; the woman 'sees' her blood flowing from her body...and she produces life without necessarily wanting to do so or being able to prevent it. In her body she periodically experiences, for a time that has a beginning and an end, changes of which she is not the mistress, and which she cannot prevent. It is in this relation to blood that we may perhaps find the fundamental impetus for all the symbolic elaboration, at the outset, on the relations between the sexes." (298)
"Personal Status and Sexual Practice in the Roman Empire" Aline Rousselle: This essay examines sexual behavior based on social status in the Roman Empire, men of position, women of position, slave women and slave men. "One simply did not feel the same emotions and desires for individuals of different statuses." (322)
"The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea" Thomas W. Laquer: Prostitution and Masturbation! "My general point is that talk about sex is about a great deal else than organs, bodies and pleasures." (335)So this is on the connection between the sexual and the social body. "While masturbation threatened to take sexual desire and pleasure inward, away from the family, prostitution took it outward...The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs...The paradoxes of commercial society that had already plagued Adam Smith and his colleagues, the nagging doubts that a free market economy can in fact sustain the social body, haunt the sexual body. Or, the other way around, the perverted sexual body haunts society and reminds it of its fragility." (340)
"The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend" Catherine Gallagher: Examines through a reading of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend "a pervasive pattern in mid-Victorian thought...that economic value can only be determined in close relationship to bodily well being."(346) Also a little bit about the reaction to the gloomy economists, Malthus, etc. "The attempt to resituate the human body at the center of economic concerns, to rewrite economic discourse so that it constantly referred back to the body's well-being, paradoxically, itself tended to do what it accused unreconstructed political economists of doing: separating value from flesh and blood, conditioning value on a state of suspended animation or apparent death." (347)
"The Meaning of Sacrifice" Christian Duverger: This is an essay on Aztec human sacrifice. Human beings were thought to have an excess of life force, life energy, ritual murder a way of storing energy because in natural death this extra energy was wasted. "The sacrifice was not the result of some inhuman, gratuitous barbarism. It was essentially a technology.
"The Sacrificial Body of the King" Luc de Heusch:This essay is on the role of the sacrificial king in Africa, a king destined for sacrifice. It tells of the "ambivalence toward the royal body...the people condemn the king to death for his very excesses." (389) "Sacred royalty is a symbolic structure that has broken with the domestic, familiar or linear order. It is a machination, a topological arrangement, which must be read as a meshing of human space and the space of the bush or forest in which the mysterious forces responsible for fecundity dwell; it can also be the bond that joins the earth and sky." (393)
"The Emperor-God's Other Body" Florence Dupont: This essay examines the rootedness of the idea of the monarch having two bodies - "one human, the other divine...the king is the conjunction of a private, human body and a political, divine body..." (397) - in the funeral rites of Roman emperors. "The sovereign was attributed a body that allowed him to straddle the two spaces, human and divine. He had a double body that divided when he died, yielding two bodies, one for men, one for the gods. It was his divine body that governed, present among men by virtue of the flesh, its material support. To avoid tyranny, the Romans invented an immortal imago, the divine body of absolute power." (418)
"The Body-of-Power and Incarnation at Port Royal and in Pascal OR of the Figurability of the Political Absolute" Louis Marin: This essay compares representations of the royal and divine body - the King and Christ. "One of these paths [to claim reign] is the process of figurability of the body-of-power: contemplate the divine body of suffering that, by its very dereliction, is the infinite body of love; contemplate it in the profane body of represented royal majesty, its portrait; contemplate, that is, examine on the spot the infinite distance of the difference of the one in the other."(446)
"Mapping the Body" Mark Kidel and Susan Rowe-Leete: Really awesome collection of images of mappings of the body, from all over the world, with pithy little quotes running alongside them.
"A Repertory of Body History" Barbara Duden: A partially annotated biography "dealing with the perceived body and the perceptual milieu."
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
"The second approach, represented by the present volume, covers the various junctures between the body's 'outside' and 'inside': it can therefore be called a 'psychosomatic' appraoch, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death." (11)
"Therefore, Socrates is Immortal" Nicole Loraux: This essay is on the Phaedo and what this dialogue does in terms of inauguarating a particular discourse on the soul, immortality and the body into western philosophy. "By irreversibly separating the soul from the body, Plato once and for all detaches the idea of immortality from the civic glory with which it has hitherto been associated." (30) "To use the body to banish the body is not as unjustifiable as it may appear. The body, it could be said, is simply an image used to speak of the soul; and how can one possibly speak of the soul without resorting to imagry?" (38) but..."the soul is immortal, but that immortality is upheld cheifly by the memorial that was Socrates' unforgettable body." (39)
"Reflections of a Soul" Eric Alliez and Michel Feher: This essay is on Plotinus' conception of the body and soul: "Plotinus regarded the human body as a degradation of the soul but also as a reflection of it; and his philosophy was not so much the occasion of a synthesis as a crossroad between two different worlds." (47) "When a human soul turns away from its body to convert itself to the Intellect from which it proceeds, it is launching itelf not toward something other than itself - even something superior - but toward the very Spirit that shines brightly within it...the internal coherence of Plotinus's theory can thus not be faulted, since the only otherness that it attributes to the human soul is the matter of which the body that the soul illuminates is composed." (63)
"The Face and the Soul" Patrizia Magli: This essay examines the ways in which, hisorically, the face is seen as the signifier for the soul. "Identifying the body has always appeared to waver between two opposing approaches to interpretation: between what we might call natural inferences, on the one hand, and arbitrary equivalences, on the other. At times, facial traits are interpreted as symptoms, vague indicaions of something secret, or else as transparent symbols, a univocal text for the owning the key to its deciphering." (89) "Physiognomics continues to rely, instead, on an inductive method that attempts to reduce the infinite variety of individuals and of facial configurations to a standardized state through drastic schematization and abstraction processes...Although by different methods and approaches, anthropologists and psychiatrists, writers and policemen, suspicious lovers and amateur painters, are all taking up and developing anew the ancient idea of a close intermingling of forms, characters, abilities and passions within the living world."(126)
"The Ethics of Gesture" Jean-Claude Schmitt: This essay looks at the generally immutable nature of gesture over time starting with the Roman Empire (Cicero, really). Regarding the visible expression of ideological codes in the West that remain pretty much the same, "the justification of 'bearing' and 'manners'...cannot be external to the code itself, whether God, the soul, reason or chivalric virtue are invoked as its foundation. Just as, in fact, it could not be seriously argued today that the only reason for social conventions is that they exist." (143)
"The Upward Training o the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility" Georges Vigarello: Want to know a brief performative history for why people had to sit up straight in the middle ages - read this essay! "The body's microcosm must evoke, by the subtleties and wealth of measures and relationships of its parts, those of the world at large." (154) "The fact is that the body, just like its uprightness, is 'caught' in a web of categories dominated by moral expectations. Deportment corresponds to the great polarities in behavior, where respect for physical bearing has the same psychological basis as knowing how to be polite." (157) "The upright body is the one that mimics and adopts the positions required by decorum. It must offer a performance, and it is shaped through the performance. Court society imposes a code of posture as its very specific pedagogical requirement." (189)
"Geerewol: The Art of Seduction" Carol Beckwith: A photo essay on series of courtship dances (the Geerewol) performed by the Wodaabe nomads of Niger, in which women judge men for their beauty in performance.
"Love's Rewards" Rene Nelli: An essay on the Asag, one aspect of courtley love in which an elaborate affair between a lady and her suitor involved a test of the suitor not getting aroused in her semi-clothed presence (among other weird tests). "No matter how one views the asag - as the natural expression of passionate love between a man and a woman, as a lover's hypocritcal ruse (despite the fact that he wa forced to excercise self-control), or even as an expression of feminine wiles - one cannot dispute the fact that, beyond its function a a kind of regulator of desire that tended to keep outright libertinism at bay, it was also an hommage to spiritual love. It was an homage founded on the idea that lovers have a need for a communion of pure feeling, and that without this communion, their physical coupling is nothing more than lewdness." (233)
"Between Clothing and Nudity" Mario Perniola: This essay looks at the history of representing the unclothed female body. "We have not left the world of metaphysical thoguth when we think of the trance as a mystical unity of man and god, finally reconciled to each other in an environment of spiritual superelevation. On the contrary, the fleshy garment associates itself with the body's otherness. Under the circumstances, the body is not a mere instrument of the subjective will; it becomes an element of ceremonial ritual which is finally free from subordination to myth." (263)
"Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years: This essay looks at the connection of Shen (Body-Person) and Xin (Heart Mind) in China over the past 150 years. "If there is a constant theme, and on that will presumably continue to be central in the future, it lies in the multidimensional tensions between xin, the heart-mind that is both individual and, simultaneously, part of a collective social heart-mind, and shen, the demanding, egotistic body-person." (346)
"The Natural Literary History of Bodily Sensation" Jean Starobinski: This essay examines literary expressions of somatic sensations. "Where do we draw the line between cenesthesia, which must be a basic assumption of every human existencce, and body awareness, which would be the hypochondriacal or perverse consequence of a narcissitic or autoerotic investment?" (369) "The field of consciousness is occupied by the participal redoubling of the I am, which becomes fixed for an instant in a being, to be suceeded by another momentary state, seeing myself: the I of "I am" is no longer more that myself as object of the act of seeing, itself supplanted by a new act of seeing, which, in turn, makes it an object. The infinite reflexivity thus initiated liberates a series of visions, each of which reduces the preceding vision to the state of an object."(390)
"The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World" Hillel Schwartz: "We have before us the Three Bodies. The first is the substantial body of middle age: fat and present. The second is the sweet body of youth: thin and past. The third is the phantom body of death: streamlined and futuristic...The Three-Body Problem is the problem of being at home in one's body through time. It is a problem posed in the modern West as a problem of fatness, thinness, streamlining. That the end of the world and the contours of the body should be so closely configured, that a machine that weighs us should also be the machine that tells our fortunes, that we should so consistently confuse pounds (or stones) with the passage of time, such must give us pause. And cause. Cause enough for a cultural history of the thin body inside the fat body, and of a third body beyond, dangerous, and possibly explosive." (411) "Slimming is an alarming solution to the Three-Body Problem not because it is selfish but becase it leads to an obsessive, delusive search for the Other. It is not becoming ourselves but becoming Other. The culture of slimming is hazardous, for it offers to put us at home in our bodies only in exchange for a denial of the passage of time. Such bodies may be houses but they are not homes." (452)
"The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan" Mary Picone:This essay looks at the Japanese form of Kanpo (Chinese Medicine). "Illness, in this ordering of things, does not exist as a separate nameabe condition deriving from a cause, nor can it be diagnosed objectively in different individuals and cured in each one in approximately the same way." (469) "For a number of Japanese today, the 'ghost in the machine' does not refer to the duality between soul and body. The concepts underlying karmic causation and kampo...give a very different sence to these entities and effectively dissolve the individual, both as a body and as the source of intention." (482)
"The End of the Body" Jonathan Parry: This essay is on the peculiar spatial proximity between body builders and the funeral pyres of Benares and what this might mean to bodily perfection and bodily cessation. "A whole and perfect body is both a sign of one's moral state and a prerequisite for making sacrificial offerings to the gods and ancestors."(502) "The general scenario, then, is one in which the human body exists in a state of precarious and constantly threatened equilibrium. It is nevertheless capable of transformation and refinement; and it is to be perfected by a good life in preparation for a good death, which is in turn a precondition for a more refined state of embodiment - until at last a real 'end of the body' is achieved."(511)
"Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven" Nadia Tazi: This essay examines the virtuality of heaven and its construction within the human mind. "[The] intent is to sketch the main theological obsession of those [late Antiquity]: the will to repeal or to absolve matter, to alleviate the weight of the world." (523) "Heaven is not a circle but an infinity of circles that can change, move and intersect since they coincide in their centers, that is, in God, and since they are the place of the soul, the intensive space of a spiritual continuity sponsored by the One and the Same...In every anthropological doctrine, the body (in itself as well as in its affects) is always the 'other' that must submit to the 'same,' a temporary, secondary part which, in order to complete the whole, must be dominated, vanquished or at least nuetralized so as not to be in the soul's way. It never exists on its own, neither in process of elevation or in Heaven; it is never an agent nor a free principle of life. Its virtures lie elsewhere, in alio: it is created, it is taken on by Christ, it serves and supports all that is in the image of God, it is united with the soul and it introduced into the ethereal regions and so on. The soul can anticipate future life only through continuous askesis of the body." (547) "Whereas the heavenly future of the soul lens itself to all sorts of evaluations, the glorious body truly possesses the dimension of a miracle." (548)
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
"The second approach, represented by the present volume, covers the various junctures between the body's 'outside' and 'inside': it can therefore be called a 'psychosomatic' appraoch, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death." (11)
"Therefore, Socrates is Immortal" Nicole Loraux: This essay is on the Phaedo and what this dialogue does in terms of inauguarating a particular discourse on the soul, immortality and the body into western philosophy. "By irreversibly separating the soul from the body, Plato once and for all detaches the idea of immortality from the civic glory with which it has hitherto been associated." (30) "To use the body to banish the body is not as unjustifiable as it may appear. The body, it could be said, is simply an image used to speak of the soul; and how can one possibly speak of the soul without resorting to imagry?" (38) but..."the soul is immortal, but that immortality is upheld cheifly by the memorial that was Socrates' unforgettable body." (39)
"Reflections of a Soul" Eric Alliez and Michel Feher: This essay is on Plotinus' conception of the body and soul: "Plotinus regarded the human body as a degradation of the soul but also as a reflection of it; and his philosophy was not so much the occasion of a synthesis as a crossroad between two different worlds." (47) "When a human soul turns away from its body to convert itself to the Intellect from which it proceeds, it is launching itelf not toward something other than itself - even something superior - but toward the very Spirit that shines brightly within it...the internal coherence of Plotinus's theory can thus not be faulted, since the only otherness that it attributes to the human soul is the matter of which the body that the soul illuminates is composed." (63)
"The Face and the Soul" Patrizia Magli: This essay examines the ways in which, hisorically, the face is seen as the signifier for the soul. "Identifying the body has always appeared to waver between two opposing approaches to interpretation: between what we might call natural inferences, on the one hand, and arbitrary equivalences, on the other. At times, facial traits are interpreted as symptoms, vague indicaions of something secret, or else as transparent symbols, a univocal text for the owning the key to its deciphering." (89) "Physiognomics continues to rely, instead, on an inductive method that attempts to reduce the infinite variety of individuals and of facial configurations to a standardized state through drastic schematization and abstraction processes...Although by different methods and approaches, anthropologists and psychiatrists, writers and policemen, suspicious lovers and amateur painters, are all taking up and developing anew the ancient idea of a close intermingling of forms, characters, abilities and passions within the living world."(126)
"The Ethics of Gesture" Jean-Claude Schmitt: This essay looks at the generally immutable nature of gesture over time starting with the Roman Empire (Cicero, really). Regarding the visible expression of ideological codes in the West that remain pretty much the same, "the justification of 'bearing' and 'manners'...cannot be external to the code itself, whether God, the soul, reason or chivalric virtue are invoked as its foundation. Just as, in fact, it could not be seriously argued today that the only reason for social conventions is that they exist." (143)
"The Upward Training o the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility" Georges Vigarello: Want to know a brief performative history for why people had to sit up straight in the middle ages - read this essay! "The body's microcosm must evoke, by the subtleties and wealth of measures and relationships of its parts, those of the world at large." (154) "The fact is that the body, just like its uprightness, is 'caught' in a web of categories dominated by moral expectations. Deportment corresponds to the great polarities in behavior, where respect for physical bearing has the same psychological basis as knowing how to be polite." (157) "The upright body is the one that mimics and adopts the positions required by decorum. It must offer a performance, and it is shaped through the performance. Court society imposes a code of posture as its very specific pedagogical requirement." (189)
"Geerewol: The Art of Seduction" Carol Beckwith: A photo essay on series of courtship dances (the Geerewol) performed by the Wodaabe nomads of Niger, in which women judge men for their beauty in performance.
"Love's Rewards" Rene Nelli: An essay on the Asag, one aspect of courtley love in which an elaborate affair between a lady and her suitor involved a test of the suitor not getting aroused in her semi-clothed presence (among other weird tests). "No matter how one views the asag - as the natural expression of passionate love between a man and a woman, as a lover's hypocritcal ruse (despite the fact that he wa forced to excercise self-control), or even as an expression of feminine wiles - one cannot dispute the fact that, beyond its function a a kind of regulator of desire that tended to keep outright libertinism at bay, it was also an hommage to spiritual love. It was an homage founded on the idea that lovers have a need for a communion of pure feeling, and that without this communion, their physical coupling is nothing more than lewdness." (233)
"Between Clothing and Nudity" Mario Perniola: This essay looks at the history of representing the unclothed female body. "We have not left the world of metaphysical thoguth when we think of the trance as a mystical unity of man and god, finally reconciled to each other in an environment of spiritual superelevation. On the contrary, the fleshy garment associates itself with the body's otherness. Under the circumstances, the body is not a mere instrument of the subjective will; it becomes an element of ceremonial ritual which is finally free from subordination to myth." (263)
"Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years: This essay looks at the connection of Shen (Body-Person) and Xin (Heart Mind) in China over the past 150 years. "If there is a constant theme, and on that will presumably continue to be central in the future, it lies in the multidimensional tensions between xin, the heart-mind that is both individual and, simultaneously, part of a collective social heart-mind, and shen, the demanding, egotistic body-person." (346)
"The Natural Literary History of Bodily Sensation" Jean Starobinski: This essay examines literary expressions of somatic sensations. "Where do we draw the line between cenesthesia, which must be a basic assumption of every human existencce, and body awareness, which would be the hypochondriacal or perverse consequence of a narcissitic or autoerotic investment?" (369) "The field of consciousness is occupied by the participal redoubling of the I am, which becomes fixed for an instant in a being, to be suceeded by another momentary state, seeing myself: the I of "I am" is no longer more that myself as object of the act of seeing, itself supplanted by a new act of seeing, which, in turn, makes it an object. The infinite reflexivity thus initiated liberates a series of visions, each of which reduces the preceding vision to the state of an object."(390)
"The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World" Hillel Schwartz: "We have before us the Three Bodies. The first is the substantial body of middle age: fat and present. The second is the sweet body of youth: thin and past. The third is the phantom body of death: streamlined and futuristic...The Three-Body Problem is the problem of being at home in one's body through time. It is a problem posed in the modern West as a problem of fatness, thinness, streamlining. That the end of the world and the contours of the body should be so closely configured, that a machine that weighs us should also be the machine that tells our fortunes, that we should so consistently confuse pounds (or stones) with the passage of time, such must give us pause. And cause. Cause enough for a cultural history of the thin body inside the fat body, and of a third body beyond, dangerous, and possibly explosive." (411) "Slimming is an alarming solution to the Three-Body Problem not because it is selfish but becase it leads to an obsessive, delusive search for the Other. It is not becoming ourselves but becoming Other. The culture of slimming is hazardous, for it offers to put us at home in our bodies only in exchange for a denial of the passage of time. Such bodies may be houses but they are not homes." (452)
"The Ghost in the Machine: Religious Healing and Representations of the Body in Japan" Mary Picone:This essay looks at the Japanese form of Kanpo (Chinese Medicine). "Illness, in this ordering of things, does not exist as a separate nameabe condition deriving from a cause, nor can it be diagnosed objectively in different individuals and cured in each one in approximately the same way." (469) "For a number of Japanese today, the 'ghost in the machine' does not refer to the duality between soul and body. The concepts underlying karmic causation and kampo...give a very different sence to these entities and effectively dissolve the individual, both as a body and as the source of intention." (482)
"The End of the Body" Jonathan Parry: This essay is on the peculiar spatial proximity between body builders and the funeral pyres of Benares and what this might mean to bodily perfection and bodily cessation. "A whole and perfect body is both a sign of one's moral state and a prerequisite for making sacrificial offerings to the gods and ancestors."(502) "The general scenario, then, is one in which the human body exists in a state of precarious and constantly threatened equilibrium. It is nevertheless capable of transformation and refinement; and it is to be perfected by a good life in preparation for a good death, which is in turn a precondition for a more refined state of embodiment - until at last a real 'end of the body' is achieved."(511)
"Celestial Bodies: A Few Stops on the Way to Heaven" Nadia Tazi: This essay examines the virtuality of heaven and its construction within the human mind. "[The] intent is to sketch the main theological obsession of those [late Antiquity]: the will to repeal or to absolve matter, to alleviate the weight of the world." (523) "Heaven is not a circle but an infinity of circles that can change, move and intersect since they coincide in their centers, that is, in God, and since they are the place of the soul, the intensive space of a spiritual continuity sponsored by the One and the Same...In every anthropological doctrine, the body (in itself as well as in its affects) is always the 'other' that must submit to the 'same,' a temporary, secondary part which, in order to complete the whole, must be dominated, vanquished or at least nuetralized so as not to be in the soul's way. It never exists on its own, neither in process of elevation or in Heaven; it is never an agent nor a free principle of life. Its virtures lie elsewhere, in alio: it is created, it is taken on by Christ, it serves and supports all that is in the image of God, it is united with the soul and it introduced into the ethereal regions and so on. The soul can anticipate future life only through continuous askesis of the body." (547) "Whereas the heavenly future of the soul lens itself to all sorts of evaluations, the glorious body truly possesses the dimension of a miracle." (548)
3.23.2006
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
These three are going to be tough to summarize, but let's try. "The history recorded by the following collection of essays is the history of that area where life and thought intersect." (11) "The history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construction...the history of its modes of construction can, since it avoids the overly massive oppositions of science and ideology or of authenticity and alienation, turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue." (ibid) The first volume is concerned with myth, theology - "the first approach, which may be regarded as a vertical axis, begins at the 'top' and measures the distance and proximity between divinity and the human body." (13) Ok, let's do a rundown of the essays / fragments:
"Dim Body, Dazzling Body" Jean-Pierre Vernant: Looks at the ways the Greeks conceived of the body of the Gods. "What was the body for the Greeks? Today the concept of the body gives us the illusion of self evidence for essentially two reasons: first, because of the difinitive opposition between soul and body, spiritual and material, that has established itself in Western tradition. And consequently and correspondingly, because the body, reduced entirely to matter, depends on a positivistic study; in other words, it has acquired the status of a scientific object defined in anatomical and physiological terms." (20) The corporeality of the gods, unlike that of men, is eternally beautiful and they are immortal for that reason. The god's body, unlike man's, is not individual in space - it can be everywhere at once. "In many ways, the divine super-body evokes and touched upon the non-body. It points to it; it never merges with it." (43)
"The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah" Charles Mopsik: This essay is about the Jewish body, Kabbalah traditions and reproduction. "What is transmitted is nothing other than the power to transmit. The power to adhere to the text, the power to engender: tradition, like the body of engenderment, is the point of passage through which the invisible allows itself to be glimpsed, through which the unspeakable allows itself to be spoken, through which the flux issuing from the infinite takes form, link by link." (63) "The genealogy of bodies makes manifest an invisible chain whose first links constitute the divine order itself, the creative activity brought forth in human procreative activity." (68)
"Indian Speculations about the Sex of the Sacrifice" Charles Malamoud: This essay is on Tantra and the Goddess who copulates with Death and sacrifices and consumes herself. "The assemblage of objects, characters, gestures and speech which composes the Indian sacrifice derives its form and intelligibility from the metaphor of the body. Because it is described as a body itself made up of conjunctions of many bodies indefinately rearranged, the sacrifice provides both the prime locus and the material for sexual symbolism...The aim and purpose of the sacrifice is to reconstitute the image of this original, precreation body." (96) "The body of Man is the model for, and origin of, the sacrifice and is therefore both its departure point and its effect. But the sacrifice, for its part, in the guise of Speech - which is its final form - is what gives the body its ultimate substance." (97)
"The Body: The Daoist's Coat of Arms" Jean Levi: This essay considers the Daoist conception of the Body as container of the universe (body as both metaphor for universe and as container of the universe). "The gods only acquire substance and form in the movement that makes them present, through the melting of the humors, just as the latter can only be decanted because the substance from which they are produced is of the same kind as the symbols or the coats of arms expressing configuration in the cosmos. In other words, the crudest physiological substance assumes a heraldic value because its secretions are integrated into a symbolic form in which they correspond to divine effigies." (123)
"Divine Image - Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism" Michael A. Williams: This essay examines the Gnostic conception of the soul as needing to escape the body. However, it is more complicated than that. "Gnostic perceptions of the body in late Antiquity manifested a certain ambivalence that is not often appreciated. On the one hand, the human self is quite completely distinguished from the physical body, and ultimately must be rescued from it; but on the other hand, according to many Gnostic sources, precisely in the human body is to be found the best visible trace of the divine in the material world." (130) "Whatever we imagine when we speak of Gnostics renouncing their bodies, or despising the flesh, we should not ignore how intrigued they seemed to have been with their own anatomy, how often they seemed convinced that truths, both pleasant and unpleasant, about their origin and their destiny could be traced within its form and functions." (143)
"The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church" Marie-Jose Baudinet: This essay is about the iconoclasts in Byzantium and concerns "the legitamacy of the iconic representation of Christ's face - the face of God's son, also known as the Father's Economy." (149)
"The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages" Caroline Walker Bynum: This essay examines the role of the (female) body in medieval piety. "Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access of the divine...Compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality - especially female spirituality - was particularly bodily; this was so not only because medieval assumptions associated female with flesh, but also because theology and natural philosophy saw persons as in some real sense body as well as soul." (162)
"The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess" Piero Camporesi: As obvious from the title, this essay is concerned with transubstantiation and the consumption of Christ's body through the host in the 18th C, when the actual eating of the body of Christ was a big deal. "Both the sensibility of believers and ecclesiastic doctrine...have over time nearly obliterated this bloody offering, anesthetizing and reducing it to little more than a symbolic act. They have edulcorated and disincarnated it, reinterpreted it as merely a trope. In other words, they have unconsciouslu rejected the awesome notion of transubstantiation, and have refused its intolerable weight." (234)
"Holbein's Dead Christ" Julia Kristeva: Kristeva looks ath Holbein's paiting of the Dead Christ, which is incredibly lifelike and hopeless. "It would seem, on the basis of [Holbein's] oeuvre...that a melancholy moment (an actual or imaginary loss of meaning, an actual or imaginary despair, an actual or imaginary razing of symbolic values including the value of life) summoned up his aesthetic activity, which overcame the melancholy latency while retaining its trace." (258)
"Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan" William R. LaFleur: Here the author looks at gaki, ghosts that were important figures in medieval Japanese Buddhism that are often dismissed by modern Buddhism for their un-Buddhist occult obession with eating poop (and other shitty stuff). "Hungry ghosts, as beings with bodies, were - at least for medieval Japn - an important reed that was woven into many places in a cognitive basket that was used to try to hold a lot of things together. To play a role in a synthesis intended to satisfy philosophers, ecclesiastics, a privileged aristocracy, a wary government and a vast 'folk' - this was what the concept of the hungry ghost was expected to do." (273)
"Metamorphoses and Lycanthropy in Franche-Compte, 1521-1643" Carline Oates: A legal history of werewolves in 16th/17th C France.
"The Chimera Herself" Ginevra Bompiani:An essay on the Chimera, the mythic monster that is both an excess of appearance but also can never really appear. Kinda a genealogy of the beast.
"The Inanimate Incarnate" Roman Paska: This essay is about puppets and it's first sentence says something like "puppet theorists disagree..etc." That made me laugh. I guess the next time my relatives ask me what I am studying I can say, well, I am not a well respected puppet theorist. It is about how in the Western tradition of puppetry, while mimesis of life is important, what is more important that the formal appearance of the puppet mimicing the body, what matters more is the gesture of the puppet, it's ability to mimic human movement, emotion, etc. It has a lot of neat pictures of puppets that are kinda freaky if you are freaked out by that kind of thing. Actually, this whole ZONE series freaks me out. I feel like I am on Buffy researching Werewolves and shit-eating ghosts and puppets that have human emotions, all that stuff.
"The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century" Jean-Claude Beaune: "An automaton is a machine that contains its own principle of motion." (431) As title suggests, this is a survey, mostly pictoral, of the automaton. "Before the automaton became a high-performance machine, an automaton was primarily a techno-mythological idea, or more precisely, a mythic distillation of technical processes and machines and, by extension, of tools or instruments." (431) "The automaton is both individual and totality, the extreme of artifice and image of recreated, revitalized nature...it has a quality of maintaining a special relationship with death - which is itself the most singular and most contingent moment of our lives, yet also the most universal, the one we know we cannot escape." (479)
Feher, Michel (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1. New York: Urzone, Inc.:1989.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
These three are going to be tough to summarize, but let's try. "The history recorded by the following collection of essays is the history of that area where life and thought intersect." (11) "The history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construction...the history of its modes of construction can, since it avoids the overly massive oppositions of science and ideology or of authenticity and alienation, turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue." (ibid) The first volume is concerned with myth, theology - "the first approach, which may be regarded as a vertical axis, begins at the 'top' and measures the distance and proximity between divinity and the human body." (13) Ok, let's do a rundown of the essays / fragments:
"Dim Body, Dazzling Body" Jean-Pierre Vernant: Looks at the ways the Greeks conceived of the body of the Gods. "What was the body for the Greeks? Today the concept of the body gives us the illusion of self evidence for essentially two reasons: first, because of the difinitive opposition between soul and body, spiritual and material, that has established itself in Western tradition. And consequently and correspondingly, because the body, reduced entirely to matter, depends on a positivistic study; in other words, it has acquired the status of a scientific object defined in anatomical and physiological terms." (20) The corporeality of the gods, unlike that of men, is eternally beautiful and they are immortal for that reason. The god's body, unlike man's, is not individual in space - it can be everywhere at once. "In many ways, the divine super-body evokes and touched upon the non-body. It points to it; it never merges with it." (43)
"The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah" Charles Mopsik: This essay is about the Jewish body, Kabbalah traditions and reproduction. "What is transmitted is nothing other than the power to transmit. The power to adhere to the text, the power to engender: tradition, like the body of engenderment, is the point of passage through which the invisible allows itself to be glimpsed, through which the unspeakable allows itself to be spoken, through which the flux issuing from the infinite takes form, link by link." (63) "The genealogy of bodies makes manifest an invisible chain whose first links constitute the divine order itself, the creative activity brought forth in human procreative activity." (68)
"Indian Speculations about the Sex of the Sacrifice" Charles Malamoud: This essay is on Tantra and the Goddess who copulates with Death and sacrifices and consumes herself. "The assemblage of objects, characters, gestures and speech which composes the Indian sacrifice derives its form and intelligibility from the metaphor of the body. Because it is described as a body itself made up of conjunctions of many bodies indefinately rearranged, the sacrifice provides both the prime locus and the material for sexual symbolism...The aim and purpose of the sacrifice is to reconstitute the image of this original, precreation body." (96) "The body of Man is the model for, and origin of, the sacrifice and is therefore both its departure point and its effect. But the sacrifice, for its part, in the guise of Speech - which is its final form - is what gives the body its ultimate substance." (97)
"The Body: The Daoist's Coat of Arms" Jean Levi: This essay considers the Daoist conception of the Body as container of the universe (body as both metaphor for universe and as container of the universe). "The gods only acquire substance and form in the movement that makes them present, through the melting of the humors, just as the latter can only be decanted because the substance from which they are produced is of the same kind as the symbols or the coats of arms expressing configuration in the cosmos. In other words, the crudest physiological substance assumes a heraldic value because its secretions are integrated into a symbolic form in which they correspond to divine effigies." (123)
"Divine Image - Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism" Michael A. Williams: This essay examines the Gnostic conception of the soul as needing to escape the body. However, it is more complicated than that. "Gnostic perceptions of the body in late Antiquity manifested a certain ambivalence that is not often appreciated. On the one hand, the human self is quite completely distinguished from the physical body, and ultimately must be rescued from it; but on the other hand, according to many Gnostic sources, precisely in the human body is to be found the best visible trace of the divine in the material world." (130) "Whatever we imagine when we speak of Gnostics renouncing their bodies, or despising the flesh, we should not ignore how intrigued they seemed to have been with their own anatomy, how often they seemed convinced that truths, both pleasant and unpleasant, about their origin and their destiny could be traced within its form and functions." (143)
"The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church" Marie-Jose Baudinet: This essay is about the iconoclasts in Byzantium and concerns "the legitamacy of the iconic representation of Christ's face - the face of God's son, also known as the Father's Economy." (149)
"The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages" Caroline Walker Bynum: This essay examines the role of the (female) body in medieval piety. "Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access of the divine...Compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality - especially female spirituality - was particularly bodily; this was so not only because medieval assumptions associated female with flesh, but also because theology and natural philosophy saw persons as in some real sense body as well as soul." (162)
"The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess" Piero Camporesi: As obvious from the title, this essay is concerned with transubstantiation and the consumption of Christ's body through the host in the 18th C, when the actual eating of the body of Christ was a big deal. "Both the sensibility of believers and ecclesiastic doctrine...have over time nearly obliterated this bloody offering, anesthetizing and reducing it to little more than a symbolic act. They have edulcorated and disincarnated it, reinterpreted it as merely a trope. In other words, they have unconsciouslu rejected the awesome notion of transubstantiation, and have refused its intolerable weight." (234)
"Holbein's Dead Christ" Julia Kristeva: Kristeva looks ath Holbein's paiting of the Dead Christ, which is incredibly lifelike and hopeless. "It would seem, on the basis of [Holbein's] oeuvre...that a melancholy moment (an actual or imaginary loss of meaning, an actual or imaginary despair, an actual or imaginary razing of symbolic values including the value of life) summoned up his aesthetic activity, which overcame the melancholy latency while retaining its trace." (258)
"Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan" William R. LaFleur: Here the author looks at gaki, ghosts that were important figures in medieval Japanese Buddhism that are often dismissed by modern Buddhism for their un-Buddhist occult obession with eating poop (and other shitty stuff). "Hungry ghosts, as beings with bodies, were - at least for medieval Japn - an important reed that was woven into many places in a cognitive basket that was used to try to hold a lot of things together. To play a role in a synthesis intended to satisfy philosophers, ecclesiastics, a privileged aristocracy, a wary government and a vast 'folk' - this was what the concept of the hungry ghost was expected to do." (273)
"Metamorphoses and Lycanthropy in Franche-Compte, 1521-1643" Carline Oates: A legal history of werewolves in 16th/17th C France.
"The Chimera Herself" Ginevra Bompiani:An essay on the Chimera, the mythic monster that is both an excess of appearance but also can never really appear. Kinda a genealogy of the beast.
"The Inanimate Incarnate" Roman Paska: This essay is about puppets and it's first sentence says something like "puppet theorists disagree..etc." That made me laugh. I guess the next time my relatives ask me what I am studying I can say, well, I am not a well respected puppet theorist. It is about how in the Western tradition of puppetry, while mimesis of life is important, what is more important that the formal appearance of the puppet mimicing the body, what matters more is the gesture of the puppet, it's ability to mimic human movement, emotion, etc. It has a lot of neat pictures of puppets that are kinda freaky if you are freaked out by that kind of thing. Actually, this whole ZONE series freaks me out. I feel like I am on Buffy researching Werewolves and shit-eating ghosts and puppets that have human emotions, all that stuff.
"The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century" Jean-Claude Beaune: "An automaton is a machine that contains its own principle of motion." (431) As title suggests, this is a survey, mostly pictoral, of the automaton. "Before the automaton became a high-performance machine, an automaton was primarily a techno-mythological idea, or more precisely, a mythic distillation of technical processes and machines and, by extension, of tools or instruments." (431) "The automaton is both individual and totality, the extreme of artifice and image of recreated, revitalized nature...it has a quality of maintaining a special relationship with death - which is itself the most singular and most contingent moment of our lives, yet also the most universal, the one we know we cannot escape." (479)
