body

A Lovers Discourse

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Excerpt from A Lovers Discourse

A Lovers Discourse by Roland Barthes consists of a peripatetic fragmentary writing which explores the ‘extreme solititude’ that is a lovers discourse evicted  by authoritative discourses, placed outside as it were, yet perhaps spoken by ‘thousands of subjects’. It is as Barthes explains a structural portrait of ‘someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other [the loved object], who does not speak. Barthes takes us on a discursive journey, a performative utterance and structure of address to the other through absence, affirmation, waiting, circumscribing, contingencies, bodies, declaration, embrace, image, the unknowable, langour and silence. Continue reading →

Dark Writing

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Klee_Line_for_a_walk

“Conspicuously left out of geography’s line – as it is left out of Descartes construction of the ‘I’- is of course the body that writes, and which, in writing, is also being written. Justine Clark explains:

The surface of the drawing is the site of involuntary traces, just as the scene of the body is the scene of involuntary muscular motions – blushing, tics, twitches – the play of internal effects across the surface of the body. If we follow Elizabeth Grosz’s contention that ‘all effects of depth and interiority can be explained in terms of the inscriptions and transformations of the subject’s corporeal surface…that the body can be understood as the very stuff of subjectivity,” then this surface of bruises and blushes, tingles and scars is crucial.”

Carter Paul, Dark Writing, University of Hawaii Press, 2009:pp.82. Image reproduced from http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/rodcorps_art/page/2/

Landing Sites > Arakawa and Gins

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Shausaku Arakawa_Out of distance / Out of texture
[Distance of point blank B]

 “Were nothing being apportioned out, no world could form. What is being apportioned out no-one is able to say. That which is being apportioned out is in the process of landing. To be apportioned out involves being cognizant of sites. To be cognizant of a site amounts to having greeted it in some manner or to having in some way landed on it. There is that which gets apportioned out as the world. There is an apportioning out that can register and an apportioning out that happens more indeterminately. A systematic approximating of how things are apportioned out should be possible.

The body is sited. As that which initiates pointing, selecting, electing, determining and considering, it may be said to originate (read co–originate) all sites. Organism-person-environment consists of sites and would-be sites. An organism-person, a sited body, lives as one site that is composed of many sites.”

For more information about the work of the artist Arakawa and Madeline Gins, artist, architect, poet and their architectural poetics in The Mechanism of Meaning please click here

Text reproduced from Architectural Body, Chapter 2 Landing Sites, MadelineGins and Shausaku Arakawa, The University of Alabama Press, USA 2002:pp.5

Image reproduced from http://nga.gov.au/international/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=74725&ViewID=2&GalID=ALL