This means that, unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning back towards the unconscious, always remain within the space of the representable, psychoanalysis advances and leaps over representation, overflows it on the side of finitude...(374)What does it mean to leap over representation? Is this simply a matter of revealing the "conditions of possibility of all knowledge of man," (375) and how does this relate to Foucault's larger project and the death of man?
Q2: In both Zoopraxographer and Primate, we encounter different apparatuses, technologies, and methods for producing objective or scientific knowledge. As the narrator of Zoopraxographer observed, most of the human models were photographed undressed. Interestingly, the narrator suggests that conjunction of the technical apparatus and the nude models in front of the homogeneous backgrounds produces a sensation of "naturalness." Indeed, in Muybridge's nude photographs, it is as though we are viewing the natural human body, even though he obtained models "from all classes." In what ways is the natural body articulated in Muybridge's photographs? How is this related to the objectivity of the camera lens? This can be compared to Primate, where an attempt at formalization and standardization does not suggest naturalness--we are thinking, for instance, of the images of the caged primates. How is apparatus represented in Primate? We suggest a close reading of the scene in which a blood sample is being processed and eventually visualized through the clear eyepiece of the microscope: what do we make of the rhythmic, almost musical, quality of the scene, in which the technologies for analyzing blood come to take on almost aesthetic value? What do we make of the resulting images of "nature"?
Q3 coming up
AA/TV/CM
2 Response:
ReplyDeleteAs the question states, the use of the apparatus achieves different results in the two films. In primate, the cages and devices serve to demonstrate the degree to which the apes are objects of a scientific/technological inquiry, and emphasize their objectification and entrapment at the hands of science. While Muybridge's images also serve as a form of scientific inquiry into the anatomy/physics/kinetics of the human body in motion, the technical apparatus of the camera here serves to create an 'natural', 'objective', view of the human form (although as we see in the Linda Williams reading this scientific inquiry serves to create knowledge and eroticism simultaneously and together). The apparatus is used in each of these films to alter the 'normal' condition of its object. In the case of the zoopraxographer, the normally cultural human being is revealed in all its naked, bodily naturalness, while with the apes the apparatus imprisons a natural wildness. The science apparatuses of "Primate" however, reflect not only on the animals they control, but on the scientists that control them. What do we make of the way the apparatus frames the depiction of science practitioners in the film? Does the cold steel of the cage and the shiny black of the microscope work to assert the humanity of the scientists in relation to the objects of their study? Or does the apparatus potentially bring into question the classificatory boundary between the object and the subject, the ape and the human?
Response to Question 1:
ReplyDeleteThis double bind of man between the level of representation upon which man superimposes his own history and being onto object so of study in order to recuperate a hollowing out, of in the case of history a de-historicization. The limits of representation, for Foucault, and as your group has aptly pointed out is that at the level of representation, where a formulation of order develops that is irreducible to the analysis of representation and that provides the very considers of their possibility. The condition of these links of representation lie outside of representation for Foucault, outside of visibility and “define for themselves an internal space which to our representation, is on the exterior” (239). Because of this interiority/exteriority complexity, more importantly, concerning anthropology and the study of man, Foucault argues that anthropology “rendered man alien to himself” through the construction of man which must be conceived and man which must be known (226). Rather, man, the study of himself as object became that which all knowledge could be constituted as evidence, perhaps relating to your question concerning the relation between transcendence and Foucault’s discussion of Anthropological Sleep.
If we think of ideology as placing all knowledge within the space of representation, then Foucault posits that the analytic of finitude, becomes a methodology of sorts to question the limits, foundation and roots of the production of that knowledge. This could be what he means by psychoanalysis’ leaping over representation, but I agree that the phrase is a bit strange. Great questions and issues that I still need to think through.