"There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality. In its suspended condition, literature can only exceed itself." - Derrida, Acts of Literature pp. 48
You cannot have a condition without being stopped up in that very condition. Meaning always hangs itself up, but in doing so, stops moving onwards.
Agamben's "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life." is fairly topical, especially given the discussions by President-elect Obama regarding the establishments of new courts (within the USA, apparently) to try individuals accused of acts of terror.
Agamben outlines the "homo sacer" as an individual who is created in the law, but as an exile. He argues that this forms a paradox: the law creates the category of homo sacer, and so the law that excludes is also what gives the individual an identity. This kind of paradox, where legal rights are suspended, but where a legal framework creates that suspension, might be interesting to you.
Have you thought about Stellarc's suspension pieces when he suspends himself from the ceiling?
1. Sitting / Swaying event for rock suspension (Tamura Gallery, Tokyo - 11 May, 1980) Encircled by 18 granite rocks, which counterbalanced its weight, the body was suspended in a sitting position. Each rock weighed between 3.5 - 4.2 kgms, one rock for each insertion point. The rocks were first suspended from eye-bolts in the ceiling, then connected to the body sitting on the floor. The rocks were then lowered, lifting the body into space. During the suspension time of approximately 17 minutes, the body swayed, gently swinging all the rocks in different directions.
Less so an instance of suspension as a physical characteristic is the disciplinary measure taken by bureaucratic systems upon its subjects (such as schools on students, employers on employees) as an intermediate sanction between detention (at least in school) and expulsion.
If you're willing to make a bit of a jump, there's the very rich (in a My Museum sort of way) social life of suspenders - as in the things that suspend pants about one's waist.
Commodities, fetishes, souvenirs, relics, rubbish. What theories help us think about things? In this course we will read Victorian travelers on West African "fetish," Michael Taussig on his imagined cocaine museum, Susan Stewart on longing and souvenirs, Freud on shiny noses, Marx on tables, Annette Weiner on the similarities between gift and commodity exchange, Mary Douglas on dirt, D.W. Winnicott on string, and Arjun Appadurai on the idea of the social lives of things. The singularization of things, the ways in which history and memory are stored in real and imagined objects, the commodification of the human body, the animation of the inanimate, utopian recycling, gleaning, found objects as art and craft: we will consider a broad range of theoretical issues in our readings and in projects that put them to quirky use.
5 comments:
"There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality. In its suspended condition, literature can only exceed itself." - Derrida, Acts of Literature pp. 48
You cannot have a condition without being stopped up in that very condition. Meaning always hangs itself up, but in doing so, stops moving onwards.
-Jonathan
Agamben's "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life." is fairly topical, especially given the discussions by President-elect Obama regarding the establishments of new courts (within the USA, apparently) to try individuals accused of acts of terror.
Agamben outlines the "homo sacer" as an individual who is created in the law, but as an exile. He argues that this forms a paradox: the law creates the category of homo sacer, and so the law that excludes is also what gives the individual an identity. This kind of paradox, where legal rights are suspended, but where a legal framework creates that suspension, might be interesting to you.
--Ryan
Hans,
Have you thought about Stellarc's suspension pieces when he suspends himself from the ceiling?
1. Sitting / Swaying event for rock suspension (Tamura Gallery, Tokyo - 11 May, 1980)
Encircled by 18 granite rocks, which counterbalanced its weight, the body was suspended in a sitting position. Each rock weighed between 3.5 - 4.2 kgms, one rock for each insertion point. The rocks were first suspended from eye-bolts in the ceiling, then connected to the body sitting on the floor. The rocks were then lowered, lifting the body into space. During the suspension time of approximately 17 minutes, the body swayed, gently swinging all the rocks in different directions.
http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/suspens/suspens.html
--Andrew
Less so an instance of suspension as a physical characteristic is the disciplinary measure taken by bureaucratic systems upon its subjects (such as schools on students, employers on employees) as an intermediate sanction between detention (at least in school) and expulsion.
If you're willing to make a bit of a jump, there's the very rich (in a My Museum sort of way) social life of suspenders - as in the things that suspend pants about one's waist.
- Crow Jonah Norlander
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