If anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called…mental anorexics….Girls and young women are also starving because the women’s movement changed educational institutions and the workplace enough to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness of power itself….the worldview taught young women is male.
Simona Giordano, Understanding Eating Disorders
Joan Jacobs Brumberg from Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
Joan Jacobs Brumberg Fasting Girls The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
Joan Jacobs Brumberg from Fasting Girls The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
while the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant.
The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.
The individual is no doubt the fictive atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society, but he [sic] is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.
When Spinoza says we do not know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry.
tell me about it, bro
*
The most interesting task is to discover the shape of the now-moment. So it
becomes a matter of forms, more than a matter of structure.
What is the form of the present, and each succeeding present? Then, see
what-can-be-done with the form that is the real form of the here-now. Those here-nows
as the building blocks of some other structure. But the quality of the blocks
determines the possible ‘style’ of the overall structure.
Now, the form of ‘now’ can be determined only as I try to twist my body
(mental) until it FILLS somehow the moment, till it touches the borders of the
moment. The meaning then, cannot be in a superimposed fable, but is in the
modes found of being able to inhabit (fill the spaces of the present, and the
sequence of those modes. Meaning is-“how do you live in a space?” Spaces arise,
the way mutations are delivered’ upon the planet-and then life tries to inhabit
that new, mutant species. In the attempt to make an arisen space ‘habitable’ (a
species is also a ‘space’ for living)-meanings arise, such as “that plant is
poisonous.” I am concerned with such meanings.
*
Meaning? Make an item (the play) that other items can allude to when they are
making an effort to crystallize their own meaning-to-themselves. The play doesn’t
allude to a real world, through having a ‘meaning’. Rather it is there to ‘give
meaning to’ anything else that wants to take meaning from it.
What we need are models for a ‘way-of-being-in-the-world’ that we’d like to
remember as a possibility. I’d like, myself, to be ‘tuned’ to the world in the way the
play I create is tuned. I establish the world of the play so that hopefully, I can turn
to it, and begin resonating to its rhythms.
*
I generate a text, I make a composition out of what I ‘know’, that is to say-a
collection of ‘meanings’ carried around inside me. One meaning … in conflict
with another meaning. That means, of course, a continually shifting frame of
reference. That means of course … that there is no conclusion … no beginning,
middle and end … but, intermissions. Until I die, But then I won’t be able to
write about it.
—Richard Foreman. “The Carrot and the Stick” (full text linked)
Three Dialogues
with Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit (full text behind link)
Little Bristling Soul 