when academics talk about the "representation of the body," what are they talking about?

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...), September 23rd, 2004.

film studies/cultural studies

The first chapter 'Spilt Color/Blur', an analysis of Paris Bordone's painting _A Chess Game_ using a semiotic frame related to the Tel Quel circle (Sollers, Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes) is hard to follow, since we lack an illustration of such work to help the reader through this arduous first encounter with Schefer's style of thinking and writing. Schefer proposes a non-systematic, non-methodological alternative to the semiological and iconographical analyses of painting used by Panofsky and other traditional art historians. He establishes a distinction between figuration and representation which may be worthwhile, not only for the analysis of color, but also of volume and even gesture in visual arts. Representation, according to Schefer, is systematic, and involves aspects such as perspective and the hierarchical arrangement of images; it emphasizes the signifier in Saussure's sense of the term. Figuration, on the other hand, is more on the side of the signified, as with the meanings attached to an image in pagan societies. In the second chapter, Schefer finds in Ucello's paintings a subversion of representation and a quest for what representation cannot figure or configure over the body. The third chapter is consistent with the same inquiry, now exploring Poussin's _The Arcadian Shepherds_, and how the body disappears as it is being represented due to the conventions of representation itself. As Goethe used to say about scientists 'you murder to dissect', Schefer somehow claims that painting 'murders to represent'. What is left by the representation of the body is for Schefer something more like a corpse within which we hope to catch it betraying itself and revealing some truth or beauty. The fourth chapter, centered around Uccello's fresco _The Flood_ (illustrated with a very low quality of printing), is particularly hard to follow as theory and perhaps better approached as literature. Schefer has stimulating intuition and he's sure that he is after something, but does not seem to care much about others that arrive at his writings from different backgrounds. His confused writing is probably an index of confused thinking; he has his question more or less clear, but his answers are far from convincing.

Nor does this:

"The artist (according to an eighteenth century critic) must take care not to allow the representation to take over to express itself. In relation to the the body, the space of representation must match the space of the real: the body is pictured correctly when it is precisely controlled by the real space in which the body is experienced. (use of perspective is necessary for this control or 'something else' is depicted). It is this 'something else' that troubles...: the representation of the body may be 'faulty' precisely on account of its excess, the surplus produced by representation and in between the intention of the artist and the representation itself."

sorry. hermeneutic

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Very early in life babies are looking around, then see their hands moving , stares at their moving hand and get a knowledge of their bodies. These are steps to build a feeling of their self, and as agent in their new environment where their actions have consequences on objects around them.

Much later, those who are choosing to permanently compose with a multiplicity of layers of communication and create a reticularity of their subjectivity have different means to represent their bodies.

i have no idea what this sentence means

who is representing the body in a film? is the actor "representing" his own body? is the director "representing" the bodies of his actors? is some authorial construct "representing" a certain concept of the body? what would examples of such concepts be?

Suggestions:
reticularia
reticularis
reticularian
particularity
regularity
reticulata
reticulate

I have have just started to write about it on this thread. Look in a couple of weeks, maybe there'll be more information.

can you try to discuss this without using lots of neologisms? i mean, go ahead and use them if you want, but it'll take a lot longer for me to understand you.

"'Human subjects never simply have a body; rather, the body is always necessarily the object and subject of attitudes and judgements.'" -- Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994)

I think the idea of the body as a "site" for a range of cultural conflicts is key.

Is this like Neducation or what?

i need to adopt an attitude of honest, relatively detached intellectual respect rather than one of contempt.

but i treasure those intellectual proclivities and defenses i've developed thus far, and i don't want to lose or abandon them.

It's a pretty massive area of study. As far as cultural studies goes, "representations" can range from media representations (art, film, journalism, tv, internet, etc.) to the study of, say, arrangment of bodies in a street protest. I am missing a lot of things in this short paragraph, but maybe it's helpful?

i have two competing impulses: to reject and to understand. i don't think i can sustain both, exactly, but somehow that's precisely what i'd like to do.

So, you know you observe "bodies/the body" every day and understand them in your own way. Reading cultural studies papers just lends another perspective to your understanding, and, like good art or a good music, it too can change your way of thinking about things, whatever those things might be. Academics have really studied a lot and weighed opinions and observations, and, especially in cultural studies, are trying to understand/explore how things in the world relate to other things in the world. Some do it better/differently than others, but that's part of the fun (?) of thinking about things - things are always being RE-thought b/c the world is always changing.

(a bit of a rant, but hey.)

(and: kristeva groupies - eek.)

x-post : oh my god, rrobyn, I was going to say the same thing. A lot of it is really obvious, it's just steeped in jargon.

Parsing the jargon is totally an acquired skill, Am - the more you read, the better you get.

I too hate ivory-tower academia, but it's structured that way: you "have to" read certain texts, be able to engage with certain concepts. That's why cultural studies rocks - it's so encompassing. And you can watch tv and call it a "text". Then you can have, like, ivory towers of Doctor Who-ism and such, which I think just points out how ridiculous ivory towers really are (but tell that to a philosophy academic... oh well.)

i do feel (i don't have the energy to try and articulate this with great precision sorry) that my research about an art form will not stray too far from the materials and concepts employed by those who create the art. and i will be careful not to presume that an art form (or examples thereof) have a "problem" that needs to be identified or resolved. (i think that's my biggest beef with psychoanalytic criticism and its myriad offshoots: the identification of a work of art with a human patient, and the resulting diagnoses of "sicknesses." i don't feel like i appreciate where people who take this approach are coming from. why are they even writing about art at all? i wonder.)

Sorry, Am, I will respond to this later when I've thought it through more clearly.

Time spent grappling with some of the worst writing can often pay off as you find ideas that completely change the way you look at your subject and the world as a whole.

As mentioned upthread, the body and how it is presented/represented often get discussed in the context of gender politics (Grosz, Butler etc...). There's a lot of good accessible writing, for instance, on masculinity and gender. Check out here for a bibliography:

http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman/resources/allbib.htm

I've been out for over four years, and obviously that hasn't happened. I haven't even applied. Why not?

Well, it's partially because -- although I really like the idea of studying and writing at a higher level, and I even like the idea of teaching someday -- I never really found a program that appealed to me. My academic interests have always been very interdisciplinary, and although English tends to be a more inclusive field than most, I never felt like I had enough of a passion for literature to warrant going after a degree in it. I'm most interested in a) how various images and ideas are manifested across a wide swath of popular art and culture, and b) how people "read" "texts" and use them in their lives (what I've always considered a phenomenological approach to art) -- and so whenever I'd read a program description that implied I'd have to take classes on Chaucer and Shakespeare (BOR-ING), I just got depressed. It's possible I'm being a baby about this, and I just need to suck it up and do that shit in order to do what I really want later. But yeah.

And then the other thing that happened was that the longer I was out of the academic environment of my undergrad years, all that academic stuff seemed pretentious at most and irrelevant at least. Even when I was in college, it kind of bothered me when friends discussed Heidegger in the cafeteria and got all fucking smug and clever about it, when other students who were just as smart but not versed at all in philosophy or critical theory ended up feeling alienated by the conversation. Maybe I just had asshole friends, whatever. But once I was out of school, where I wasn't attending classes and writing academic essays and receiving praise from professors, that ultra-academic world seemed even more distant. Nobody outside the academic sphere is talking about Luce Irigaray, so why should I care about her? Plus, I soon began to realize that there was a lot of interesting intellectual work that was being done outside the academy in places like magazines and blogs -- and that this kind of writing, devoid of alienating jargon and incessant sycophantic name-dropping, was both approachable and more at the heart of the larger cultural conversation.

I realize, though, that when I decry academia as "insular" that a good part of that is borne out of a frustration of being unable to fit into something that I'd assumed almost my entire life that I would be part of.

Yeah, if I can't relate my academic life and work to the world outside academia, then it's not worth it. In fact, I don't even like to say "academic world", though I know it exists - it is part of the "real world", another aspect of it (I think its elitist connotations separate it more than anything. Seriously, treeplanting or working the nightshift in a pulp mill are just as much their own "worlds" as academia could be said to be). I just don't think intellectualism and academia should be separated from the so-called "real world" (read: working world, labouring world) like this. It's sad, to me, that thinking about things and making connections that might solve some serious widespread problems is not seen (in general) as contributing to the real world. (How many times are students asked the question: "So what are you going to do with that degree?" I now just say "stuff, lots of different kinds of stuff, don't you worry.")

You're right, there are plenty of intellectuals who haven't gone to school but have found different avenues of learning and expression that suit them better. And also, just b/c one has read Foucault and Heidegger and Haraway doesn't mean one has to name drop - I rarely do b/c it creates an obvious power/knowledge issue, which creates distance, when what I really want to do with what I've learned is put it in my own cultural context, communicate about it with other people, and learn more so that positive change can happen somehow. Academia works best when engaged with its environment b/c, after all, that is what should fuel it - it's a *relationship*, back & forth like! (However, some academic areas just seem to fuel themselves.)

But Jaymc, Masters/PhD in Cultural Studies? C'mon, you know you're interested.

(and thanks for the compliment, bert :) )

I understand, I've felt a lot of that - all the more when I returned to school, though my dept wasn't theory-crazy, to their credit. I think the age of postmodern theory is on the wane, to be honest - though I suspect it persists more strongly in somewhat less-well-established fields like media/film/cultural studies, because there's more need for setting up a framework and shoring up academic cred. I just learned to trust my own intuition and write about things that interested me when reading/analyzing texts.

In grad school what you really have to do is be reliable and find your niche, and you don't need to do hardcore theory for that unless you want theory to be your niche. It's a market. A very, very small one in which your eventual goal is to have your own little square of academic turf, and very few people to talk to.. Personally I got sick and tired of trying to slog my way through theoretical texts that made very little sense. In France, Derrida is not taken very seriously. Gayatri Spivak does not need to be that hard to understand and I no longer feel obliged to twist my brain into knots trying to wring something useful out of whatever she's saying about subalterns and catachresis - not if she's going to treat her readers like that.

Amateurist, you worry too much about being careful in how you deal with this that or the other subject. It's just art and theory, so take a stand on it - some of it's brilliant, some of it's crap. You know? I don't think there ought to be this air of reverence surrounding this stuff, because that makes it less interesting. I also don't think "representation of the body" is a theoretical conceit in and of itself. Now, you can talk about the notion of art as representation and different theories of representation, and in that context talk about the body.. but there's not a particular theory rubric called "representation of the body." Sorry if my English is bad here, I did a lot of academic writing in French and now I'm all mixed up.

By the way.. Amateurist, did you start grad school already? Are you about to? Are you sure you know what you're getting into and what your goals are? I'm just warning you because I feel personally lucky to have gotten out with my sanity and health mostly intact, to be brutally honest about it. It's an incredibly tough, insular and peculiar world and the rewards are few.

And finally, one of my favorite into level theory books is Critical Terms for Literary Study by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, I've gone back to it many times.

By the way, Daria, what exactly are you studying?

Heh.

Actually, this is something that worries me about writing as a career in general. I feel like I'm happiest once I've accomplished my assignment, and I can print it out and gaze admiringly at my words and think, "this is really good, innit!" But the process up to that point can often be grueling.