[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Parallax Journal issue "Installing the Body" (7/15/07; journal issue)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

[call for papers for parallax 46]

   Installing the Body

   The act of installing something requires not only a particular
something to be installed and a particular place for this something to
be installed, but also a purpose. What is installed is assumed to be a
specialized and ultimately useful apparatus or machinery. We want to
think about how the body functions as this kind of apparatus in
divergent disciplines. Over the past years, the body has been
established with a certain prestige in a variety of fields of
theoretical, artistic and other inquiry. Now that the body has been set
into a "ready-for-use" position, installed as it were, this issue of
parallax reflects back on the job. "Installing the Body" approaches
these questions from the intersection of three fields of enquiry and
their overlapping as well as diverging investments into the apparatus of
the body: dance studies, installation art and cinema studies. In
different ways and to different ends, in each of these fields the body
has been successfully installed as a central theoretical issue that
brings into view the relational aspects of experience and meaning making.

   Within Dance Studies, the focus on the moving body informs this
field's current trajectory to further flesh out of the dynamic character
of meaning making. The dancing body as active agent performs theories of
embodiment through practices of "know how" and "how to." The
relationships between these bodies dancing and the bodies watching them
create sites where desire installs present, though moving and moved,
bodies. For a long time the pleasurable  and therefore dangerous
commingling of the dancer-audience body gave reason for dance to be
rejected as a serious and meaningful practice, much less a field of
study, whereas today, dance is more and more considered a relevant way
of reading, or even of thinking.

   In installation art, the interaction between work and viewer, which
results in a specificity of place, time and situation, points to the
performativity of meaning making. Experiencing installation art involves
installing ones body, being installed as body and being installed in a
particular way. Seducing, teasing or confronting its audience by means
of works that turn this audience into the performer of the work,
installation art (implicitly or explicitly) proposes theories of the
body that happen here and now through the body. With a booming market
for installation art, how might we understand the seeming desire to
experience this kind of "instant" embodification?

   Starting with the cinema of attraction, Cinema Studies has long
investigated the body's desire for moving-images. Founded as a
discipline to take account of cinematic aesthetics and the production of
aesthetic experience, the body is designated as the place where images
are collected, stored and worked out; where experience and meaning
making are performed. The body in Cinema Studies is also a projection
screen for desire, often articulated as the passive recipient of
ideology. The dominant psychoanalytical, semiotic and phenomenological
traditions in this field each try to explain the body's desire to relate
to media and make meaning. The recent role of affect in cinema seems to
unseat earlier bodily issues relating to the subject. With a decisive
turn to the "body genres" of weepies, horror and pornography, for
instance, what is at stake in changing the focus from desire to affect?

   Using meta-discursive perspectives, then, and a fine-toothed comb,
"Installing the Body" seeks out the histories of the contemporary body
and aims to critically understand the multiple desires that have given
it a form and proper contents. What micro-theories are embedded in the
ways in which the body has been installed? What about the relationship
between the body and what seems to be its twin concept: desire? What
desires inform "all this fuss about the body" (Caroline Bynum 1995)?
What kind of bodies are the subject and object of this desire? How does
the fuzziness of the term "the body" affect employing a body that is
composed of movement, thinking and sensation, in comparison to theories
that install bodies of language, subjectivity and identity? Which kinds
of bodies are installed? For instance, are they gendered, queer,
disabled, migrant, ethnic, pornified, transgender, grotesque, hybrid,
viral, sick, drugged, excessive, trained or dysfunctional bodies? And
what is it that makes these fields currently so sexy, so desirous?

   We welcome contributions in these directions as well as perverse
routes to "Installing the Body." Theorists and practitioners are invited
to submit scholarly writing or artistic forms.

   Submission deadline: 15 July 2007

   Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the guest-editors:
   Eliza Steinbock and Maaike Bleeker
ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis)
   University of Amsterdam
   Oude Turfmarkt 141
   1012 GC Amsterdam, NL

   Email: E.A.Steinbock at uva.nl
   Maaike.Bleeker at let.uu.nl



Drs. Eliza Steinbock
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/e.a.steinbock/
ASCA : OudeTurfmarkt 141 : 1012 GC Amsterdam : NL : +31 020 525 3878

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