Who's miming who?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y

Midterm Project

We're going to work on presence and in some capacity Heredia's The Couple in the Cage.
Will elaborate later-
AM/BW/AB

Week 6 Screening Question

How/can can we read the Peruvians filming their Western as an example of the combination of Frazer's Law of Similarity ("that like produces like"..."the notion of the copy, in magical practice, affecting the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires properties of the represented" and Law of Contact or Contagion ("things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after physical contact has been severed") (Taussig 47)? How does the inclusion of Kansas in the Peruvian "film" and the fact that a lot of the "acting" is actually more real (consider the scene in which Kansas tries to teach the Peruvians the concept of faking a punch) than that which it imitates complicate this reading (or the Laws)? Also, how can we read the Peruvians' film as a parody "where mimicry exposes construction"? (Suggested consideration of the Josephine Baker anectode and its foreshadowing of a "new sort of anthropology...that defines its object of study not as Other but as the reflection of the West in the mimetic magic of its Others" (69).)

SS + SF

Hey guys,

Monica, Jesse and I are going to do captivation for our presentation. See you tomorrow.

Week 6: Mimesis and Alterity: Questions for March 9th

This week's reading dealt with a interesting tradition of the critique of modes of representation and an interrogation of representation as a practice. Taussig mentions that in Benjamin's work he "liken[s] the process of opening the optical unconscious to the surgeon's hand entering the body and cautiously feeling its way around the organs" (31). The "optical unconscious" which is acted upon through an "interpenetration" of body and image. In this sense its not only visual but also tactile, a synesthesia. Taussig notes that in the "penetration" there is also a "transgression" of the taboo: "the body is entered, the organs palpated" (ibid). If Taussig suggest through Bataille that the "function of the taboo is to hold back violence," and that "this tactile knowing of embodied is also the dangerous knowledge....damned by the taboo," then is this to say that the mimetic faculty either is a violent act or is that which enables violence? Can we read Derrida's notion of the arche-writing as a "violence" as a reading of the "mimetic faculty"? Is there a violence or penetration (in reference to Taussig's first chapter) in the magic of representation that gives power to the individual who represents over the represented?

One moment we would particularly like to interrogate comes from Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty." Here Benjamin attributes a "history" to the "mimetic faculty" in two senses: "the phylogenetic" and "the ontogenetic." Benajmin states for the "ontogenetic sense" of the mimetic faculty's history that,

play is for many its school. Children's play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train. (OMF, 160).

Benjamin thus sees an originary or development of the mimetic faculty from "play" and particularly exposes this in his example of the "child." Is this theoretical move a reduction of the mimetic faculty and mimesis to "nature," "the primitive," and "the child?" What then would be at stake in such a grouping? How does Taussig support or resist this grouping in his own writing?

-SS SF

Midterm Preference

Hi yall,

Me and Sabrina will be taking "Fetishism" for the midterm project.

-SF SS

Week 5: Labor/Tool - Framing Questions and Screening Question

Framing Question

In what ways do Povinelli and Agamben approach their critiques? Can we think of Agamben as a critique from within? Is it a deconstruction of Western discourses on the human/animal dichotomy? Can Povinelli’s be seen as a type of comparative politics as a means to critique or deconstruct, through opposition, ontological assumptions of the political economy of value, practice and identity? As a critique from the outside or from the side? How do both show the incongruities between the binaries that they position and how does each writer deal with these spaces?

Can we think of dreaming as similar to Levi-Strauss’ construction of the bricoleur? Or in what ways does it offer a critique of such a conception? Can we see Povinelli’s text as complicating Levi-Strauss’s conception of mythical thought as bricolage?

Passage for close reading:

“Belyuen Aborigines play with the terms of economic, cultural, and historical arguments, but they are also cognizant of the multiple ways in which resistance is rearticulated into dominant relations of power. History, then, neither dictates cultural forms or is subsumed by them, but rather emerges in processes of social action and association” (Povinelli, 14).

What does Povinelli see as sites of potentiality? Povinelli’s seems very explicit on the importance of counter-hegemonic discourse in its resistance of the selective appropriation and ahistorically framed identity of the Belyuen Aborigines by the West. What is the importance of the “process of social action and association,” in her argument?

Film Question

How does the film imagine the community or space of the gleaner? Does their consumption serve to demystify the commodity? If they are consuming non-commodities to begin with, if we apply Marx’s text, then how can we think of their consumption as outside of capitalist modes of exchange?

Can we put pressure on this romanticization and in what ways does Varda address this in her project, the film is wrought with the idyllic representations of the gleaner through the Impressionist paintings?
What is the importance or significance of the medium of video in Varda’s project?  How is time is articulated in the film (the clock without hands, the the aging of Varda’s hands, the decay of the potatoes)? What is time’s relation to decay?

[Suggested close reading of the scene in which Varda drops the armful of wheat  in exchange for the videocamera.]

Jesse, Emmett, & Monica