Introduction to the material
Ceramics is one the most ancient mediums for human expression, it serves as an extension of our bodies as it is and we are made of the earth itself. Those who work in clay follow an enduring, global tradition which yet remains fresh and exciting in the world of contemporary art. Clay is an intensely intimate material; there is something about clay and fire that evokes a form of primitive self. It activates a visceral sense of pure intuition, giving the maker the freedom to navigate an internal reality. This intimacy creates a dialogue from the artist to the viewer. Ceramic art’s tactile nature records the fleeting moments in time and space by encapsulating the energy of the makerʼs hand sweeping across the form. This idea of exhibiting touch, gives the the viewer the ability to see how they were made. I highly regard this aspect of clay and it promotes a deep respect for looking and thinking.
The Mirror Reflected: Fragmented Feminine
For many cultures its visual aspects such as pictorial images, signs and symbols are the most powerful and complex modes of transmitting cultural narratives. What is seen is only the surface of the unseen systems of meaning at work — in pictorial descriptions and in writing, both are comprised of the signifier and signified. As in the iconic forms of signification, the seen is aggregated with the unseen, making it difficult to distinguish. The seen is considered evidence, truth, the real, as sight establishes a subject relation to reality in which our visuals, such as looking at an object is seen as ours and ours alone. This differentiates vision from other senses, such as the tactile and auditory functions, which are more of a subjective relationship between subject and object. Visual culture gives us a false sense of autonomy where we can distance ourselves giving a sense of separation to the spectator. This has resulted in a subtle evolution of the structuring of subjectivities with the consequences of the representation of sexual difference. 1
Feminist exploration into visual culture aims to unfasten the binaries of gender and sexuality in visual representations. Feminism disrupts the system that reproduces stereotypes in such repetitive and damaging ways. It aims to understand the relationship of thoughts to fantasy, to our emotions, representing our interior understanding of consciousness in relation to our exterior form. 2 Through the lens of semiotics, this investigation has revealed plenty in regards to how language and its biological biases communicate the nature of imagery and its everlasting social effects.3 Semiologists assert that there is no fundamental value to what we know, only a general understanding contracted of word and images operating through a system of binary difference. Through the semiotic, we understand that knowledge is gained through patriarchal framework that is not neutral but informed by the asymmetrical imbalance of power inherited within that system of vision. True meaning is not fixed but fluid, always changing and in motion; as a result, it is contradictory or inconsistent, revealing a paradox of existence.
In visual culture, a woman’s experience, rather than offering a subjective mode of interpretation that offers a clear reflection of a defined social order and hierarchical structure, is more like a distorted carnival mirror, in which we recognize what is depicted but it does not necessarily correspond to how we see ourselves, leaving the body in a state of division and incompletion.4 Both Lacan and Freud assert that the ego is doubled, split in two, between the interior as the projection of the surface, and the exterior as the corporeal surface.5 However, this idea of divided subjectivity can be linked to Hegel, with his master/slave dialectic.6 The ego exists as the mediator between external and internal experience: the divide between self and other, and the denial of this divide is what is necessary in order for the subject to represent itself as a unified whole in order to maintain identity.7 Luce Irigaray writes about this state of incompleteness in relation to women as the “other,” which is a state of non-being:
“Woman, for her part, remains an unrealized potentiality—unrealized at least for/by herself. Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another? And in the sharing of substance, not only is she secondary to man but she may just as well not be. Ontological status has her incomplete and incomplete-able, she can never achieve the wholenesses of her form. Or perhaps her form has to be seen—paradoxically—- as mere privation: But this question can never be decided since women is never resolved by/being, but remains the simultaneous co-existence of opposites. She is both on and the other.” 8.
This evokes an intense searching for an identity that will never be defined, but its fluidity evokes a maximum number of possible future identities to exist. 9
Though it is seemingly impossible to reflect upon this constantly shifting internal image, I am interested the radical place of in-betweens and movement. This is where the body seems to morph, when it is motion, I am trying to capture this fleeting moment in time and space that cannot be seen unless through an apparatus, in this case, a camera. The morphing body also represents the changing of femininity to suit the present “image” of women, it is the moment where a woman becomes another woman through fragments of the female self being passed on through time. By turning inside to outside, it exposes the superficiality of the face as a changeable mask, revealing that the corporeal is just a changeable surface and does not reflect the eternal. It is what is underneath the mask, this externalization of the interior that reveals something, something that is hidden, an invisible dimension of self identity.10 The multiplication of the female form serves as a metaphor for the metamorphosis of femininity, the transformation of women over the centuries, from being whole to incomplete beings.11 This work re-examines questions between the distinction of biology and culture, by exploring the way in which culture constructs the biological order in its own image.12
This fragmentation of the female self in an art historical image reveals the symbolic fragmentation of ideal beauty is a conceptualization by male artists; it is a political and aesthetic act, in that each fragment participates in the demolition of past traditions that were traditionally upheld and valued and are now being scrutinized.13 This artistic work is always in the process of emerging from or on the verge of slipping back into the material, resulting in an nonconformist figure that is opposed to the finished and the polished. My work exhibits the cost of inhabiting the female body: it is an existential dilemma that deals in the real, which is not imagined feelings, but it is drawn from the catharsis of dramatic emotional experiences; thus, articulating the difference between inhabiting a female body and looking at it.14 The fragmented body has long been rooted in surreal, in that these bodies shed skin, ooze, vertebrae protrude outside the flesh, the body breaks out from its allotted space from which a new life springs. Arms and legs dissolve or have been broken off, but the fragments saved to exasperate the resistance to wholeness that she is denied. It speaks of the segmentation of the body and to the female body as the site of division.15
When women artists tamper with epistemological truths such as the positioning of the real above the ideal, she performs an undoing of the ideal feminine beauty in art.16 This strategy of unravelling feminine truths through mimicry of the ideal, makes the unseen visible, and ultimately disrupts this singular notion of a “correct femininity” that has both the potential for creativity and destruction. By respecting the complimentary nature of difference, women can form a sisterhood that has the possibility of accommodating differences between women through dialogue. Even when a woman’s mode of self representation in relation to another woman can be steeped in misunderstanding, it points out that commonalities between women are always in flux and temporary.17
Footnotes
1 Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Pg 1; 2. Ibid. Pg 4; 3. Ibid. Pg 2; 4. Stafford, Sally In Feminist Visual Culture. Pg. 233; 5. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg 86 & 99.; 6. Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 40; 7. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg 86 & 99.; 8. Ibid. Pg 86; 9. Ibid. Pg 86-87; 10.Ibid. Pg 89; 11. Leeming, David pg. 72; 12. Groz, Elizabeth. Pg 242 in Colomina, Beathriz. Sexuality and Space.; 13. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg 80; 14. Carson, Fiona 60-61; 15. Isaak, Jo Anna. pg. 225; 16. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg 81; 17. Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 64
The Mirror Reflected: Fragmented Feminine Biography
Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Feminist Visual Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. 2001.
Colomina, Beathriz. Sexuality And Space. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1992.
Diprose, Rosalyn. The Bodies Of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London & New York: Routledge. 1994
Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism & Contemporary Art. London & NewYork: Routledge. 1996
Leeming, David. Medusa: In The Mirror Of Time. London: Reaction Books Ltd. 2013.
O’Bryan, Jill C. Carnal Art: Orlans’s Refacing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1999.
Stafford, Sally. Film Theory. 229-245.Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Feminist Visual Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. 2001
Into The Mirror: The Masquerade
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the image of man at twice its natural size.”1
-Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf uses the image of the mirror to describe the absence of women from historical and cultural production. Still, the process of looking for ourselves has revealed something of the workings of this apparatus.2 Luce Irigaray also uses the analogy of a mirror in various forms, particularly, as a flat mirror which is faithful, polished and empty of altering reflections, confirming the male order of the singular.3 The mirror can be seen as a metaphor for how regimes of representation are constructed for a male subject spectator, for whom the coding of visual representation offers transcendence. This illusion of singularity or centrality is contradictory to the multidimensional experience of reality.4 As women, we fashion and refashion ourselves through these encounters with the mirror, which can provide only fragmentary mis-recognitions that are conditioned to accept and emulate.5 As man is confirmed through his never changing status in the mirror and by her ever changing accommodation for his image to remain whole, the representation of ‘woman,’ which he has constructed, functions for his subjectivity. It is the paradox of the reflected mirror that is not a reproduction of ‘the same’ but as a representation.6 Nietzsche also observed a similar consequence of women’s relation to the mirror:
“Women are unable to find depth of their surface. Like actors they reflect forms not their own, merely repeating themselves according to an image provided by others. Submission results in the constitution of shame. Calcifies because submission collapses the difference between her appearance (Surface) and the concept of her unfathomable depth”.7
This struggle for mutual recognition is not the battle between the sexes but a battle between two equal self-consciousnesses, both of whom have invalidated the significance of their embodiment. As the concept of man and woman are unstable, neither complementary or opposite leaving behind an acute asymmetry. Women have negated their difference to preserve their embodiment, as his desire to kill the other is replaced by a desire to dominate the other.8 Women are not simply excluded from an ethical life nor is she confined to the realm of the ineffable.9 The body is seen as a sign of the self, that always seems to view itself as independent from others, but like any sign, it only exists in relation to another. It is the enigma of the mirror’s symmetry: that the representation of ‘woman’ is not the same as him but as his place of origin through his relationship with the (m)other.10 Lacan confirms this with his essay on the mirror stage. He articulates the complexity of one’s link to the body and to its relationship with psyche, in that, when we depend on the perception of oneself via a reflection in the mirror. The image is then confirmed through the feedback from the mother resulting, in a loop where ‘she’ has to be defined by him in order to maintain ‘her’ relation to sameness and by being the ‘other.’11 At the same time she reflects his ‘sameness,’ in this, women have become his inverted mirror image. If she were ever to be recognized as ‘different’, becoming a woman subject, his ‘subjectivity’ would be in jeopardy. 12
With this statement, the female body only exists for another, that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.13 In Hegel’s analysis of habits he places the body as the site of one’s specific ethos. As a sign of self, the body is always already socially constituted or transformed as it is invested with meaning and value.14 While the body serves as a reflection of a social structure, not all bodies have the same shape or develop the same habits and capacities. Through the lens of Hegel’s ethics it reveals that women’s bodies are the ground for the material construction and exchange of equivalences between men.15 If femininity is congruent with that of male individuality, then this suggests that women are constituted by default through the suppression of the representation of her own difference.16
With these revelations is there no hope for genuine female authenticity? If we are just inverted reflections of men, what can we do as female artists to disturb this apparatus? How can we discuss this divided self? Can it be described, explored, and reconstructed? For feminists, the mirror apparatus enables the deconstruction of the classical realm of knowledge.17
Deconstructionists, such as Luce Irigaray and Jaques Derrida, identify the radical possibilities of deconstruction is to reconstruct, to dissolve, or to oppose traditional binary distinction. It is a critical practice of playing with ideas and thus destroying convention and giving representational form new thoughts. 18 Derrida reflected on the possibility of a less discriminate sexual difference beyond binary difference with this observation:
“I would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices. Mobile of non-identified sexual marks whose choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual’, whether he is classified as ‘man’ or as ‘woman’ according to the criteria off usage.”19
With this statement, sexual duality is not just outside the bodies of women but with men as well, women and men bear the same burdens of social structure.20 Derrida provides a way of rethinking common conceptions of politics and struggle, power and resistance, but insisting that no system, method, or discourse can be as all-encompassing, singular and monolithic as it represents itself to be. Each is inherently open to its own undoing. Its own deconstruction is not imposed from outside a discourse or tradition but emerges from its own inner dynamics. 21
The mirror functions as an action at a distance, and is defined philosophically as the idea that one body can affect another without intervening the mechanical link between them. The bodies are separated by entry into space yet when one moves so does the other. Woman is still moved by male desire in that women are only changeable to the extent that man’s interpretations move her. Woman’s unfathomable changeability is similar to the Dionysian experience described by Nietzsche Twilight Of The Idols:
“The entire emotional system is alerted and intensifies: so that it discharges all of its power of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of metamorphosis, the incapacity not to react ( in a similar way to certain types of hysteric, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation)…[The Dionysian individual] enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself.” 22
This kind of changeability is creative and Nietzsche ties it to a feminine disposition of dissatisfaction and mimicry. 23
“Would a women be able to hold us (or, as they say, ‘enthral’ us) if we did not consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against us? or against herself—which in certain cases would be a crueler revenge.” 24
As man’s self-image depends upon women conforming, be it in submission or at a distance. It is the image that man has constituted for himself If a woman does not conform to this image she effectively wields a dagger against his notion of self. That women can wield the dagger, suggests the possibility of non-conformity, the possibility of artistry.25 The question is, can feminists on both sides of the spectrum see a world that takes that “magic delicious power,” which Woolf suggests women have perfected through the service of man, and turn it inward to reflect the figure of women not double but just its natural size? 26
Footnotes
1. Isaak, Jo Anna. Pg. 225; 2. Ibid. Pg. 225; 3. Robinson, Hilary. Pg. 65-66.; 4. Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Pg 11; 5. Isaak, Jo Anna. Pg. 225; 6. Robinson, Hilary.Pg 65; 7. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Pg.125. In Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 95; 8. Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 47; 9. Ibid. Pg.55; 10. Robinson, Hilary. Pg. 66; 11. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg. 38; 12. Robinson, Hilary. Pg. 66; 13.Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg.47 14.Ibid. Pg.46; 15.Ibid. Pg 54; 16. Ibid. Pg 58; 17. Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Pg. 11; 18. Ibid. Pg 9.; 19. Derrida, Jacques. Pg.184 Also found in Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg.78; 20.Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg.78; 21. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg.81; 22. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Pg. 73.; 23.Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974 pg. 126 also in Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 97; 24. Ibid Pg. 98; 25. Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 98; 26. Isaak, Jo Anna. pg. 225
Into The Mirror: The Masquerade
Carson, Fiona & Pajaczkowska, Claire. Feminist Visual Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. 2001.
Derrida, Jacques and Bass, Alan. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978
Diprose, Rosalyn. The Bodies Of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London & New York: Routledge. 1994
Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism & Contemporary Art. London & NewYork: Routledge. 1996
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. The Gay Science. New York: Vintage Books Edition. 1974
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. Twilight Of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. New York :Oxford University Press, 1998.
O’Bryan, Jill C. Carnal Art: Orlans’s Refacing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1999.
Robinson, Hilary. Reading Irigaray Reading Art: The Politics Of Art by Women. London: I.B. Tauris Co Ltd. 2006.
Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy In The Feminine. New York: Routledge. 1991.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1929.
Wielding Daggers: The Female Uncanny
“It is a woman’s countenance divine
With everlasting beauty breath there
Which from a stormy mountain peak, supine
Gazes into the nights trembling air.
It is a trunkless head, and its feature
Death has met life, but there is life in death,
The blood is frozen—but unconquered nature
Seems struggling to the last— without a breath
The fragment of an uncreated creature.”1
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
This Shelly poem evokes the image of the figure of the Medusa, as a sacred site for human negotiations between life, death, and sexual difference. For Freud the Medusa was a “petrifying force,” reducing men to hysteria based of a sexual fear of the defiant female body. A fear of “enslavement, seduction and the loss of manhood.”2 Amy Adler reminds us that Perseus kills Medusa not while looking at her but while looking at her reflection on his shield, and she suggests that pornographic film provides a similar mirror effect, in “taming” the female body by making it passive, removing its power to return the male viewer’s gaze. Essentially Perseus removes the “monstrous” threat of the woman's direct stare; he is now free to look at her without her looking back at him.3 When women fail to obey they lose their head, this can only be avoided on condition of total submission.4 In this case, the Medusa’s uncanniness exposes the presumed familiarity of symbolic violence and its reaction to the female and its link to monstrosity. It suggests a fear of female power and the anti-female message in greek myth and culture, that still persists to this day.5
The uncanny is something well known and familiar that is deliberately forgotten, it is the belated mark of repression. Freud initially took interest in this phenomenon in 1919 as aesthetics had shown little interest, in that, he argues it has been neglected because it is neither beautiful nor pleasurable.6 He traced the uncanny back to the dread of castration that is then projected into the female body, which is perceived as having been already punished by the father with her castration.7 The uncanny is arguably one’s reaction to their own mortality stemming from childhood beliefs that have not been overcome, they are superstitions that should have been collectively grown out of. Primitive beliefs in the sorcery and the supernatural are quick to resurface despite an evolved intellectual faculty of an adult. Yet an adult still finds the uncanny impossible to handle and, as it is to be found anywhere, repression resides in the psyche.8
So why is the power of the female body so threatening? Why is it when women defy their construct it creates a monstrous quality? The female gaze reveals that it is too frightening to even contemplate, in that women themselves are uncanny because their bodies are perceived as already mutilated due to their “lack” or because their gaze reminds them of penis envy and the precious thing they have to loose.9 In affect, women’s bodies have become the phallic signifier and the price of the lack is death, in more ways than one. The uncanny female represents death for men as it wields a dagger against his subjectivity; conversely women are being sentenced to a living death of imposed silence of submission.10
Feminists are drawn to this obscure notion of the uncanny, as it exposes the symbiosis of feminine division of self for survival.11 In effect my work has an innate sense feminine multiplicity, as she is split into at least two and and is hurled into a melancholic place of waiting. Giving birth to a sort of angst, with its rendering a nakedness that is aggressively emphasized by its tactility, is an expression of the feeling of the body’s interior projected in an exterior space. As a result, my work is inherently uncanny and wields a subversive potential.12 In Laura Mulvey’s “Woman as Spectacle” she confirms that the uncanny can be used as defensive strategy:
“Women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another, but what they see bears little relation or relevance to their own unconscious fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet in a real sense, women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. The true exhibit of the phallus. Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies.”13
This conjures this idea of the difference between the “nude” and “naked,” made famous by Kenneth Clark. Georges Didi-Huberman argues that this separation or distancing from the spectator is associated with the obsessional idealization of the female nude in art history. The “nude” operates as a defence mechanism against the sexual desirability of these nudes, “taming” the body as their interior remain interior. The nude is against a desire that is entrenched in fear of the “naked” which is in a way threatening, with their visible genitalia, making the invisible visible leads towards the horror of the body’s insides and internal organs. The interior is inevitably characterized in terms of violence and horror, “to open a body is surely to disfigure it, to destroy all its harmony.” 14
Lynda Nead argues that: “One of the principle goals of the female nude in art has been the containment and regulation of the female sexual body. The forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body—to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from space of the other.”15
It re-enforces that women’s true sexually is too intimidating, as it takes away his notion of self and self control; her seductiveness and beauty has been demonized, making her out to be a sort of femme fatal, creating this image of a sexually empowered woman to be inherently wicked. Resulting his continued control over how her body should be seen and used, in order to maintain his sense of self. The uncanny and the grotesque in art seem to invert these social bodily hierarchies; the grotesque body is extended, protruding, fragmented, heterogeneous, incomplete, open, excessive, incongruent and multiplied. It is “the body of becoming, process and change,” as Mary Russo put it in her analysis of female grotesques. This inversion of ‘up’ and ‘down’ as well as of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ the emphasis on fragmentation and fracture as well as on emphasis on re-assemblage transgress boundaries of the body alluding to potential transformation of the norm.16. With my work, the bisected amputated, chopped-up women objects endure an intentional defacement to exhibit the common theme of the faceless woman as a fetishized sexual object seen throughout the history of art. The grotesque body can be used as a vehicle for exploring the effect of its repression. 17
All women go through this fragmentation in one way or another, and it can be used as a place of commonality among women. Bringing together the segmented, fetishized body parts and corporeal segmentation draws attention to the ties of female eroticism and it’s relation to death and male subjectivity. This reveals a blind spot in the female body’s sexual economy, as it is transformed into the uncanny.18 Luce Irigarary argues:
“ Woman has no gaze, no discourse for her specific secularization that would allow her to identify with herself (as same) to return into the self or to break free of the natural specular process that now holds her—to get out of the self. In her case “I” never equals “I”, and she is only that individual will that the master takes possession of, that resisting remainder of a corporality to which his passion for sameness is still sensitive, or again his double, the lining of his coat. Being as she is, she does not achieve the enunciatory process of the discourse of history, but remains its servant, deprived of self (as same), alienated in this system of discourse as in her master and finding some hint of her own self, her own ego, only in another, a You-or a HE-who speaks.” 19.
It again questions female authenticity, is it possible to avoid renewing the same structures? To take up position of subject without exclusion of the other?20 It reveals the danger of making female figurative work, as the artist can never be above suspect of reinforcing negative attributes of women, by creating them into objects for a consumer age. In the attempt to claim female identity it will inevitably lead to a loss of identity, as an underlining paradox that women cannot obtain complete uniqueness in order to fulfill the ideal of heteronormative romance.21. Searching for female identity draws a line between the quest for identity and the fear of the other, or fear of being other. It constitutes the body as the site of exteriority as being foreign to ourselves, the existential “not-being-at-home with one’s self,” of the Dasein.
Yet there is hope for other possibilities for women, beyond subordination to men in the primordial dispersed structure of human being in the world Dasein, as Heidegger outlines in the Being and Time.22 The Dasein means “original being” a primordial dispersed structure of human where possibilities are left open. According to Heidegger, the Dasein is always already ahead of itself, always “beyond itself.”23. Dasein suggests that deep down humanity has an innate desire to transcend the condition of human mortality.24. This can also be related to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, where the abject is that which is “ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable the thinkable,” it is the messy and unrepresentable, the base of the sublime. Taken from Kant, the sublime is a place were the imagination is asked to grasp something it cannot.25 It is a form of knowledge gained independent of experience, a pure form of sensuous intuitions. It is a place where the body is neither subject nor object. The abject as well as the sublime have the qualities of the object, in that it is opposed to being the “I”; it is where meaning collapses.26. Kristeva explains that:
“Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.” 27
The abject is the link between our creative force and the wounds of the feminine self, and the sublime is a place between transcendence and death.28 It seems it is impossible to escape the social and biological constructs that our society has in place, but when we use our intuition we can partially grasp our primordial self. Intuition is the heart of artistic expression, but when we attempt to analyze our “intuition” the intimacy is lost and is replaced by symbolism. It seems we cannot escape the dualistic nature of knowledge without it becoming false unto itself.
Footnotes
1. Leeming, David. Pg.49; 2.Ibid. Pg.67; 3.Ibid Pg.78; 4.Ibid Pg.45; 5. Ibid. Pg.90. 6.Kokoli M. Alexandra Pg. 20; 7. Ibid. Pg. 21; 8. Ibid. Pg. 13; 9. Ibid. Pg. 48; 10. Ibid. Pg. 45; 11. Ibid. Pg. 62; 12.Kokoli M. Alexandra pg. 60; 13. Mulvey, Laura. pg 13; 14. Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria. pg 192; 15. Nead, Lynda. Pg 6; 16. Papenburg, Bettina & Zarzycka, Marta. Pg.15; 17. Kokoli M. Alexandra pg. 40; 18. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg. 117; 19. O’Bryan, Jill. Pg. 122; 20.Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria. pg.188; 21.Ibid pg.184; 22. Diprose, Rosalyn. Pg. 73; 23. Craig M. Nichols. Pg.3; 24. Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria. pg.184; 25. O’Bryan , Jill.pg 99; 26.Kokoli M. Alexandra pg. 51; 27. Kristeva, Julia. Pg.10; 28. Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria. pg.184.
Bibliography
Wielding Daggers: The Female Uncanny
Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Bollingen Series xxxv.2. Princeton, New Jersey: Princton University Press, 1972.
Didi-Huberman, Georges, Goodman, John. Confronting Images.University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.
Diprose, Rosalyn. The Bodies Of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London & New York: Routledge. 1994
Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Kokoli M. Alexandra.The Feminist Uncanny:Theory And Practice.New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2016
Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Leeming, David. Medusa: In The Mirror Of Time. London: Reaction Books Ltd. 2013.
Russo, Mary J. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York, NY: Routledge. 1995
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.Screen 16, no. 4 (1975): 6-18.
Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1992.
Nichols, Craig M. Primordial Freedom: The Authentic Truth of Dasein in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. In: Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000
O’Bryan, Jill C. Carnal Art: Orlans’s Refacing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1999.
Papenburg, Bettina & Zarzycka, Marta. Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics. New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. 2013.
Pollock, Griselda & Sauron, Victoria Turvey. The Sacred and The Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference. New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. 2007.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Arnold V. Miller, J. N. Findlay, and Johannes Hoffmeister. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin, Joan Stambagh. Seit und Zeit/ Being and Time. New York: State University of New York Press.199
Lacan, Jacques & Sarup, Madan. Modern Cultural Theorists. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press Jacques Lacan.1992.
Beauty and The Cyborg: Views On Femininity In A Digital Age
We have seen the demand to create a human-built world. As Heidegger observed we are forever striving towards the complete mastery of nature. As a result new technologies are coming out everyday, inevitably shaping our world and the way we live. We are living in a decisive historical time, Ernst Jünger describes that humanity is experiencing the “breaking of the time barrier”, this implies that technology is evolving faster than culture. This rapid progression of technology shows no signs of slowing nor do we show any resistance; we shape our technologies, then our technologies shape us, in an ongoing cycle that produces our everyday physical and social environment.1. In 1969 John McHale noted that:
“ Our emergent world society, with its particular qualities of speed, mobility, mass production and consumption, rapidity of change and innovation, is the latest phase of an ongoing cultural and social revolution. It has few historical precedents as a cultural context. Industrial technologies, now approaching global scale, linked to an attendant multiplicity of new communication channels, are producing a planetary culture whose relation to earlier forms is a Vostok or Gemini to a wheeled cart. World communication, whose latest benchmark is Telstar, diffuse and interpenetrate local cultural tradition, providing commonly shared cultural experience in a manner which is unparalleled in human history.
Within this global network, the related media of cinema, TV, radio, pictorial magazine and newspaper are common cultural environment sharing and transmuting man’s symbolic needs and their expression on a world scale. Besides the enlargement of the physical world now available to our direct experience, these media virtually extend our physical environment, providing a constant stream of moving, fleeting images of the world for our daily appraisal. They provide psychic mobility for the greater mass of our citizens. Through these devices we can telescope time, move through history and span the world in a variety of unprecedented ways.”2.
In an attempt to understand the implications of human and machine co-evolution, in particular, in how this evolution affects women’s perceptions of themselves and their bodies.3 What are the implications of this global scale interconnection? Could technology build and reinforce the stereotypical establishments of power, such as hierarchical loops of domination, and how would this affect our current attribute of describing women?4 Is there a connection to man’s need to control nature with the use of technology, similar to man’s relationship to woman and their subjugation? Heidegger describes technology as a language of “harvesting”, first the harvesting of nature, as the physical world then reduced to a passive resource for exploitation.5 I can't help but to see the connection as Sadie Plant writes:
“Woman, he has always said,
are tied to the earth
and too tangled up
with its messy cycles and flows.”6
She further elaborates that women have been the natural resource for man, for that she serves as his mirror for his own cultural development, his servant and accommodator, his spectacle of commodity, the possibility of the reproduction of his species and his world. Furthermore that woman has never been the subject, nor the agent of this history, just an autonomous being. Not left behind; but carefully concealed, she nevertheless continues to function as the ground of possibility of his quest for identity, agency, and self control.7.
In 1951, Marshall McLuhan published his first book The Mechanical Bride analyzing the psychic effects of mass media in which economies used sexuality to sell products. It was not only a very effective marketing strategy but reenforced underlying shared male ideologies of womanhood and sexuality. He implies that sexualized commodities and mechanized sexuality, is a symptom of a larger phenomenon of a industrial society. As he describes it:
“ One of the most peculiar features of our world-the interfusion of sex and technology. It is not a feature created by ad men, but seems rather to be born hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on the one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.”8
McLuhan also notices the recurrent images in advertising that fragments the female body and other physical attributes.9 This identification of women through the body, is how women in our culture learn their own particulars for self surveillance. It is as Foucault puts it, “ permanent in its effect, even if it is discontinuous in its acton.” 10. The devastating implication of this that the inevitable internalization of these ideals results in shame that many women have for their own sexuality, particularly when it fails to measure up to its alleged reflection in pop culture as well as how it both compounds and confronts that shame by compulsively returning those images in movies, television and fashion magazines. McLuhan concludes that :
“That when sex later becomes a personal actuality, the established feminine pattern of sex as an instrument of power, in an industrial and consumer contest, is a liability. The switch over from competitive display to personal affection is not easy for a girl. Her mannequin past is in the way”.11
Mass media in America has definitely established itself as a power dominated by heterosexual male tastes. So it is not surprising that mass media reinforces the oppressive female stereotypes by encouraging women to to find liberation in consumerism. As a result women fulfill the traditional role of women, which is already a passive one: already a consumer, already an emotional nonintellectual who is not supposed to think or act beyond the confines of her home.12 Women, like the computer, appear at different times as whatever man requires of her. She learns how to imitate; she learns simulation. And, like the computer, she becomes very good at it, so good in fact that she too, in principle, can mimic any function. As Luce Irigaray suggests: “Truth and appearances, and reality, power… she is — through her inexhaustible aptitude from mimicry — the living foundation for the whole staging of the world.”13.
This American vision of a technological utopia is no longer the stuff of science fiction, the imagining of new realms for our bodies and environment is already here. What is the cybernetic surveyed body/self?14. How does that relate to the postmodern body? Is it the contemporary human fate, for us to be able to transgress our bodies to be dumped into the waiting data archives for purposes of future re-sequencing? One idea is that the postmodern body is neither stable or singular. Like multiple selves and appearances, it is fluidly transformed and transformable.15. This cyborg body is that which is already inhabited and through which the interface to a contemporary world that is already made.16.
As Electronic devices are becoming increasingly miniaturized for easy portability, essentially designed to become an extension of our bodies, it is an evolving network of production and distribution.17. So does that mean we are already cyborgs? Donna Haraway explains that the definition of a cyborg can be anybody, that is, both its own agent and subject to the power of other agencies. An organic cyborg can be defined as a monster of multiple species, whereas a mechanical cyborg can be considered a techno-human amalgamation.18. Sadie Plant speaks about the collapsing identity into the cybernetic net: “If the male human is the only human, the female cyborg is the only cyborg”.19. The female cyborg is a compelling image and it engenders the question of how it will affect the current patriarchal agenda.20. The majority of automata is decidedly representative of the female body that is meant to serve as some form of entertainment. The pre-industrial representations of the automata such as L’Horlogère, functions as an early prototype of later conceptual models of the cyborg. The woman is a clock. The clock is a women: complex, mechanical, serviceable, and strictly decorative. The fact that L’Horlogère represents a female body is indicative of the role she is meant to play as the objectification of cultural sophistication and sexuality. This cyborg, in particular, appears more trapped by the mechanical parts than liberated through them.21.
Donna Haraway gives us a little optimism, hope that we are all not destined to be part of a dark Horlogère future, offering the “main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins”.22. This is what make the cyborg subject so interesting, it participates in a de-entering of traditional subjectivity, of the organic or essential identity and body; on the other hand, it offers a physical and bodily experience of what some feminists call “strategic subjectivities”. The promise and the danger of the cyborgs are becoming to bear striking resemblance to what various feminists argue we need: the experience of difference without opposition, rejection of a science of origins and embrace the exploration of multiple overlapping subjectivities. Without clear origin, the cyborg does not dream of being outside of representation, outside politics of representation, the bodies the voices the mutable boundaries of cyborg representation offer radical possibilities.23. As Haraway points out, cyborg bodies can take pleasure in machine skill, and thus have embodied reasons not to demonize it in favour of some mythical organic origin or unity; but they also have “ an intimate knowledge of boundaries, their construction and deconstructions crucial to reconstructing the boundaries and technologies of daily life and the networks of power. If “our bodies are maps of power and identity”, then cyborgs offer a new map, a new way to conceive of power and identity, one potentially more effective in understanding, confronting and reshaping the actual networks of power in late capitalism and its mutations.24.
So why, despite the transgressive possibilities of the cyborg as a subject position, is the cyborg is not necessarily more likely to exist free of the social constraints? It should come as no surprise that the traditional, gendered roles of the euro-American idea of the cyborg are rarely challenged as the concept arises out of the industrially “privileged” our Euro-American perspective, it is easier to remain with a cultural system that we are already comfortable with. 25.
The question remains can there still be subjective identities? Or, will it merely become pre-described by the limited function of the computer? When will our bodies mutate and become a matter of software engineering? The debate rages on in our current postmodern world, is technology the menacing, de humanizing, automated, controlling, mechanized enterprise we imagine? Or, is it an alternative toward emancipation of patriarchal domination? Philosophers have certainly had trepidations toward technology in in the past, but the fact of the matter is that many intellectuals today have embraced technology as a site of resistance, in an effort rid us of the dualisms that have plagued our culture from the beginning of time. But is it possible? Digital reality seems to already contain alternative possibilities toward emancipation, and/or domination. As a manifestation of the power of the virtual class, digital reality definitely plunged the world into a great historical crisis.26. Ann Balsamo writes that:
“These new realities offer a new information environment, but does not guarantee that people will use the information in better ways. It is just as likely that these new technologies will be used primarily to tell old stories that will reproduce, in a high tech guise, traditional narratives about gendered, race-marked body.” 27.
Inevitability issues of ethics are addressed. In matters concerning the effects of high technology with the relationship with ourselves and nature, also calling upon race, class & gender distinctions in a deeply rooted hierarchy of privilege. In the grand scheme of things technology alone cannot determine design and shape this new frontier, this is determined by individuals that are shaped by social and political interests. This kind of making creates a new form of division of class hierarchy. Working with new technology denotes a kind of privilege, where only the “privileged” get to have access to this new technology and the get to experience this new “utopian world”.
How will these new stagings of the body be played out in the virtual world? Will bodies be customized to fit fashion? as Emily Martin calls it a “taylor-made specificity” to fit the reconstructions of contemporary society? In this world postmodern bodies can shape shift. Cyberspace games invite the player to reconfigure their bodies and identities, to fit an objective. The investing part is that the more interesting adaptions are the most expensive.28. Even though the fetishized nature of such technologies, the result is the formation of a post modern schizo-culture that is unselfconsciously elitist and often disingenuous in offering its hacker’s version of the American dream. 29.
Footnotes
1. Mitchell, William J. Pg. 6; 2. Gere, Charlie. Pg 119.; 3.Gere, Charlie. Pg 7.; 4. Richards, Catherine. Clicking In. Pg. 259; 5.Kroker, Marilouise and Arthur. Clicking In. Pg. 256; 6. Plant, Sadie. Feminist Visual Cultural Reader. Pg. 640; 7. Plant, Sadie. Clicking In. Pg. 132; 8. Heuer, Megan. Ghosts In The Machine. Pg. 21; 9.Ibid. Pg. 21; 10. Mitchell, William J. Pg. 27; 11.Heuer, Megan. Ghosts In The Machine. Pg. 21; 12. Malloy, Judy. Pg. 55; 13. Plant, Sadie. Pg. 133. Clicking in.; 14. Richards, Catherine. Pg.259 Clicking in.; 15.Clarke, Adele. pg. 147 The Cyborg Handbook.; 16. Ibid. pg.pg. 267; 17. Mitchell, William J. Pg. 6 & 23; 18. González, Jennifer. pg 268. The Cyborg Handbook.; 19.Richards, Catherine. Pg.261 Clicking in. 20.Ibid. pg.262.; 21. González, Jennifer. pg 269. The Cyborg Handbook.; 22.Haraway, Donna. Pg. 589 The Feminism & Visual Culture Reader. 23. Hables Gray, Chris. Pg. 459. The Cyborg Handbook.; 24.Ibid. Pg.459. 25. González, Jennifer. pg 270. The Cyborg Handbook. 26.Kroker, Marilouise and Arthur Pg. 249; 27. Balsamo, Ann. pg. 630 Feminism & Visual Culture Reader.; 28. Hables-Grey, Chris p.147; 29.Balsamo, Ann. pg. 629 Feminism & Visual Culture Reader.
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