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Beyond Stasis: The Medium of Moving Bodies in the Work of Choreographer Ginette Laurin
No full textoai:etopia.journals.yorku.ca:article/36559The following paper proposes a model for considering the nature of embodiment through the lensof contemporary dance. The primary aim of this study is to examine the methods through whichthe medium of performance can offer insight into the specificities of the lived body. I pose thematerial body as site of intercorporeal exchange and as a locus of dialogue. Rather thanaccounting for the body as always already being in motion, scholarship on the body has atendency to consider it as a static and concrete form. In order to develop a methodology fortheorizing the lived experience of corporeality, I consider the work of Montreal choreographerGinette Laurin’s evening length work, La Chambre Blanche, by way of example. It is the aim ofthis paper to suggest that a collaborative engagement of Brian Massumi’s post-Deleuzian body,alongside a reading of the traditional phenomenological model of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’snotion of “the flesh” (1968), may provide the tools necessary for a comprehensive reading of thebody in motion
Incorporeal Encounters and Affective Relationality in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique
Get PDFIn Krzysztof Kieslowski’s own words, his 1991 film, The Double Life of Véronique, is a “film …about sensibility, presentiments and relationships that are difficult to name, that are irrational ....[It’s about] something that doesn’t exist in the picture alone or in the music alone” (Stok 1993:34). This film, produced in Poland and France, along with his French-produced Three Colours Trilogy of the early 1990s, constitutes the final installment of this Polish-born director’s distinguished career. Over his thirty-year career of directing films and documentaries, Kieslowski repeatedly returned to a particular problematic to which most of his work, includingThe Double Life of Véronique, could be seen as a response. Set within a particular cultural andpolitical history of Europe, Kieslowski’s films sought to express a response to the problematic oflife, and its paradoxical, immanent and yet differential relationship with death, non-life or whatis other than human
Encountering the “Ecopolis”: Foucault’s Epimeleia Heautou and Environmental Relations
Get PDFFrédéric Gros, the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1981-1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, remarks that the last years of Foucault’s life (from 1980 to 1984) were “a period of amazing acceleration, of a sudden proliferation of problematics.” “Never,” he pronounces, “has what Deleuze called the speed of thought been so palpable as in these hundreds of pages, versions, and rewritings, almost without deletion” (Gros 2005: 517). Marking a crucial shift in the focus of Foucault’s thought after a long career of describing systems of power, in this particular series of lectures Foucault lets the figure of the subject appear “no longer [as]constituted [by]” but rather as “constituting itself through well-ordered practices” (Gros 2005:513, italics in the original). My interest in this paper is to examine Foucault’s late lectures on the Ancient Greek practices of epimeleia heautou, or techniques of “care of the self” and their relationship––the way in which they re-encounter––the themes of biopolitics, governmentalityand discipline in his earlier work. In addition, I am interested in how his ideas pertaining to care of the self constitute productive ground for an environmental ethics––an ethics of relating to the spaces that surround and sustain us
HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MIND: OR,CONJECTURAL SAVAGES, FICTIONAL HUMANS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF RIGHTS
Get PDFIn 2004, historian Lynn Hunt published an article entitled “The 18th Century Body and the Origins of Human Rights.” Therein she argues that humanist experiences of the body that emerge with the penal reform movement of eighteenth-century Europe represent the origins ofthe concept of human rights as we know it today.Hunt’s primary concern is the emergence of a “rights possessing body” that causes a major shift in thinking around mid-century. In outlining this shift, she first illustrates how the rise in the popularity of portraiture during the latter half of the eighteenth-century functioned to“encourage the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original” (Hunt 43). Hunt suggests that such a proliferation of “individuated bodies” lays the groundwork for a new kind of emotional experience requisite for modern human rights—a feeling of sympathy for someone else whose own autonomous body has been violated
An Encounter with the Dead and a Fantasy of Communication: Intersubjectivity of Elegiac Poetry
Get PDFIn his essay, “Autobiography as a De-facement,” Paul de Man comments on the elegiacprosopopoeia as follows: “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making thedead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living arestruck dumb, frozen in their own death” (1979: 928). In this view, by becoming a mouthpiece forthe dead, the living elegist enters the world of death. This idea has formed the basis for ourcurrent theorization of elegy as a point of intersection between the dead and the living, a medium of communication between the two
Canadian Identity and Canada’s Indian Residential School Apology
Get PDFCanada’s more than century-long Indian Residential Schools system transferred Indigenous children from their homes and communities to state- and church-run schools with the goal offacilitating their assimilation into Canadian society. In 2008, Canada delivered an official apology for its role in the system and its legacy. This apology has the potential to heal Indigenous/Settler-state relations, but to do so it must transform existing relationships and further simple coexistence as a reconciliation mechanism. The social construction of Canadian identity as lawful and benevolent may present a barrier in achieving these goals and may ultimately hinder meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous peoples
WHERE HAVE ALL THE REVOLUTIONARIES GONE? HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE REINVENTION OF REVOLUTION IN REBIYA KADEER’S DRAGON FIGHTER
Get PDFFor five and half years, Rebiya Kadeer was imprisoned as a political prisoner in China and was finally released in 2005 after Amnesty International campaigned for her release. Today, she now campaigns as a human rights activist against what many Uyghurs consider Chinese occupation of their homeland, Xinjiang. Although many organizationswork on human rights violations against the Uyghurs, Rebiya Kadeer has emerged as the primary symbol of Uyghur resistance in China, much like the Dalai Lama for Tibet.Her simultaneous position as both a human rights activist and resistance symbol offers a unique vantage point in exploring the relationship between memory, women, and nationalism. In sketching out these connections, this paper will analyze the agency and representation in the process of memory making and the gendering of resistance in relation to the life and memoir of Rebiya Kadeer. The political project of witnessing through representation offers a practical departure point for better understanding the formation of a feminine revolutionary subjectivity in contrast to the romanticized icon of the masculine, revolutionary hero. In proposing the relationship between memory, women and nationalism, this paper aims to ultimately understand whether the revolutionary subject has in effect become the human rights activist. And if this is the case, what then are the conditions for revolution, and is revolution possible within the logic of human rights discourse
Renegotiations of Canadian Space in Contemporary CBC Audio Distribution Models
Get PDFThis paper treats the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) online ventures as examples ofthe national public broadcaster’s continued negotiation of Canadian space. More specifically, the paper looks at the online streaming and podcasting of English language radio broadcast content. This paper accounts for CBC Radio One’s distribution of audio programming—historically by way of national broadcasts and more recently by way of online streaming and podcast archives—as models of Canadian cultural transmission, which marginalize outlying Canadian regions in relation to production centres in Toronto and Montréal. This paper treats CBC Radio One’s collection, assemblage and transmission of programming as better indicators of theinequalities between production centers and outlying regions than any particular programming content. With focus on the most recent incarnation of the CBC radio morning interview show, Q,and drawing from Canadian communication studies, I will outline how the podcasting of Englishlanguage CBC radio programming both rearticulates the broadcaster’s history and presence as acentral manager of Canadian stories, and provides audiences with opportunities to activelyundermine this centralized management
CULTIVATED TRAGEDY: ART, AESTHETICS, AND TERRORISM IN DON DELILLO’S FALLING MAN
Get PDF“We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. Above all, theatre is meant to teach us this.”( The Theatre and Its Double, 60)On September 11th 2001, the sky did just that and the photogenic skyline of New York City came tumbling down. In a controversial New York Times article, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen termed these events “the greatest work of art in the whole cosmos” and although this outraged the nation at the time and was quickly suppressed, it does not make the theoretical approach any less valid. Don DeLillo’sworks and his ongoing exploration of authorship and terrorism are an encapsulation of Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe’s observation that “the impulse to create transgressive art and the impulse to commit violence lie perilously close to each other.” Exponents of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' or 'total art work' advocated an attack on all senses and emotions. Wagner and Runge, amongst others, believed that if one unified the visual, aural and textual arts into one completely integrated whole, the effect on the audience would be of such power that great personal, and consequently social, change or revolution could be effected (Grey 1995). Artaud developed these principles further in his 'Theatre of Cruelty' by moving from representations of an experience to providing the audience with the actuale xperience. Watching his play Plague, Anaïs Nin found that instead of “an objective conference on the theater [sic] and the plague” the audience members were forced to undergo the experience of “theplague itself” (192). Vomiting was actually induced in various spectators. Artaud the playwright acts as Artaud the aesthetic terrorist, assaulting the senses, the body and the consciousness of his audience. DeLillo states in Mao II that the writer should “make raids on human consciousness” in order to “alter the inner life of the culture” (41). This transgressive, frequently invasive, theory of art is focused towards creating social and psychological transformation and bears a striking similarity to acts of terrorism, which are allegedly employed to engender social change
THE RIGHT THING OR A HUMAN RIGHT: RIGHTS, LIBERTIES AND HEALTHCARE REFORM
Get PDFThe recent framing of healthcare as an issue of rights has invigorated public opinion, and given renewed relevance to the opposition between negative and positive liberties in the contemporarydebate. The right to healthcare resources can be interpreted as stemming from “positive” liberty and the right to opt-out or be “left alone” as “negative freedom” (Berlin). In this paper, we will describe how the current American debate on healthcare – with its use of the arguments for and critiques of“negative” liberalism - and has its foil in the trajectory of Swedish healthcare reform. Alluding to both public debates and some of the formative philosophical and political texts surrounding the issue, we will describe how both Swedish and American thinkers have used these two liberalisms to elevate healthcare above mere policy debate to the level of human rights, and how canonical texts are mobilized to justify claims about healthcare. Our goal is to invite further conversation on what is undoubtedly a critical and complex crossroads in the political landscape of both Sweden and the US