Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body
The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins
Helena Eflerova
Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1980:145)
The Language Of Women
Volatile Bodies/Sexed Bodies : Elizabeth Grosz
1 have attempted to read the male discourses dealt with here as discourses for and about men, discourses which have ignored or misunderstood the radical implications of insisting on a recognition of sexual specificity, discourses which have presented their claims—radical as these might be—without any understand ing of their relevance to or usefulness for women’s self-representations. I have not attempted to give an alternative account, one which provides materials directly useful for women’s self-representation. To do so would involve knowing in advance, preempting, the developments in women’s self-understandings which are now in the process of being formulated regarding what the best terms are for representing women as intellectual, social, moral, and sexual agents. It would involve producing new discourses and knowledges, new modes of art and new forms of representational practice outside of the patriarchal frameworks which have thus far ensured the impossibility of women’s autonomous self-representations, thus being temporally outside or beyond itself. No one yet knows what the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women with nonpatriarchal terms for representing themselves and the world from women’s interests and points of view. This book has been a preliminary exploration of some of the (patriarchal) texts which feminists may find useful in extricating the body from the mire of biologism in which it has been entrenched. But the terms by which feminists can move on from there, can supersede their patriarchal forebears, are not dear to me. But perhaps the frame work I have been trying to use in this book—a framework which acknowledges both the psychical or interior dimensions of subjectivity and the surface corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training; a model which resists, as much as possible, both dualism and monism; a model which insists on (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously blend with and support each other; a model where the join, the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power; a model that may
be represented by the geometrical form of the Mobius strip’s two-dimensional torsion in three-dimensional space—will nevertheless be of some use if feminists wish to avoid the impasses of traditional theorizing about the body.
Patti Smith
Cartwheels
Come my one, look at the world Bird beast butterfly
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky
Spring is departing Spring is departing
Her thoughts are darting like a rabbit Like a rabbit ‘cross the moon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon
Pretty in pink It makes me wonder
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown
Hearing a voice, you turn your head You vanish into the mist
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown
The world is changing Your heart is growing
Hearing a voice you turn your head Girls turn by ones, by twos
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues
The good world The good world
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing…
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing…
The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins Helena Eflerova Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey. The future must no longer be det…
Source: Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body
Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence 