{"id":251,"date":"2021-12-04T10:30:50","date_gmt":"2021-12-04T15:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/?p=251"},"modified":"2021-12-04T10:40:19","modified_gmt":"2021-12-04T15:40:19","slug":"reflections-on-week-11-brooke-holmes-and-martha-friedman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/2021\/12\/04\/reflections-on-week-11-brooke-holmes-and-martha-friedman\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Week 11 (Brooke Holmes and Martha Friedman)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Sincerest apologies for the delay! — I had a particularly rough go with my Booster shot.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Our final meeting began with recapping David Levine’s visit and analysis of the Adrienne Piper piece. <\/span>Piper, by defining each discipline as a \u201chat\u201d of equal but non-transferable or integrative value, argues neither for interdisciplinarity nor antidisciplinarity as we have understood them.\u00a0 Instead, she values the borders of things, both of the disciplines and of her selves. I wonder, should each of us be more discrete, and less discreet about our discreteness? What are our stand-alone hats? Fedor offered a new term to explore this new vantage point on disciplinarity with: pluri<\/i>disciplinarity. <\/span>Professor Dolven offered us a metaphor to think with: the university as a <\/span>city<\/span><\/i> versus the university as a <\/span>corporation<\/span><\/i>. How do the disciplines in their current configuration aid in producing either of these atmospheres? The concept of disciplines being either forms<\/em> (more capacious) or genres<\/em> (more suffocating and prescriptive) also came up as a circle back to the beginning conversations of the term.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also discussed Levine\u2019s idea of \u201ctaste\u201d and the argument that the disciplines are shame-controls or shame salves. This was particularly striking to me. I have never considered whether my disciplinary choice reflected not only the questions I wanted to ask\u2013the central and epistemological hows<\/em> and whys<\/em>, as Hazal described it\u2013but also the parts of my researching Self I wished to reduce or avoid. As an anthropologist engaging in homework (as in, fieldwork in my own community; I dislike the term native anthropologist), I do feel a heightened sense of insecurity about my identity and choice to testify as belonging to a particular people and place. Are my disciplined forms of questions asking and data-analyzing a boon to these discomforts of the inquiring Self?<\/span><\/p>\n

Once Brooke Holmes and Martha Friedman joined us, we explored many themes, but perhaps most pointedly: What does it mean to have a body<\/em> in our contemporary moment? What does it mean to produce a <\/span>body<\/span><\/i> of work? A phrase that particularly struck me is when Brooke described our bodies, according to Classical medical science and philosophy, as: \u201cjust moments of coalescence in a world in flux.\u201d (Wow!) I found the organic conversation between Holmes and Friedman refreshing. There were many great threads that pertained explicitly to our task at hand: the disciplines.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

First, I think it was critical that Holmes responded to one of the class questions by qualifying Lucretius\u2019 mode of address as \u2018the second personal.\u2019 As opposed to the first personal\u2013understood as the feeling point of view (body)\u2013and the third personal\u2013understood as the knowing point of view (mind)\u2013Lucretius is always addressing and engaging with a \u201cyou\u201d in a collaborative process of situated, mobile, and strategic knowledge-making, in the Haraway sense of two bodies and minds entangling<\/em>. It collapses our understanding of first and third personals as binaries of subjectivity and objectivity. And, by engaging in different and relentlessly specific ways of knowing, Lucretius is creating a community of knowers: relativism builds community. I also found that Holmes\u2019 description of the fluid body as \u201cin perpetual flux: amorphous, labile, elusive\u201d (Holmes, <\/span>In Flux<\/span><\/i>) echoed our discussion of Levine and Piper at the start of our class session. The \u201csmall wonder\u201d that Classical Greek medicine required the discipline of philosophy and <\/span>techne<\/span><\/i> to manage the messy, flawed, and potentially dangerous free-willed body reminds me of the \u201csmall wonder\u201d of the disciplinary boundaries and chiefdoms to manage the fluidity of our inquiring selves\u2013as embodying \u201clife unbound\u201d (Holmes, <\/span>In Flux<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, I think Friedman’s reflections on her body of work were illuminating. In an interview on her exhibition <\/span>Castoffs, <\/span><\/i>Friedman describes the grid of the gallery as a bounded body \u201cthat you as a viewer sort of puncture\u201d and get disoriented within (Freidman,<\/span> interview with Henry Gallery<\/span><\/a>). This piece, along with the humours exhibition, explores the tensions between the disciplined and undisciplined gaze onto the body and challenges the disciplining of our gaze from the ground up, i.e., through the presentation of the object. I wondered if this disorientation is part of what \u201cform fears in matter,\u201d as Brooke alludes to in her review of Castoffs, as well as \u201cwhat defenses … these fears produce\u201d (Holmes, \u201cTime-Lapse\u201d). As one example, Friedman uses spikes to plug holes in the fragmented body parts, holes which Holmes defines as the greatest threat to the classical body. How could we understand our own disciplinarity as the plugging of holes with spikes, large and small? Visible and imperceptible? Is there anything genuinely wrong with this inclination?<\/span><\/p>\n

Lastly, I enjoyed hearing Friedman\u2019s four-piece treatise on Lucretius and want to sit with her offerings: first, she had tensions with Lucretius\u2019 bidirectionality of ontology and was disinterested in raising the inanimate to the animate; second, she viewed Lucretius\u2019 articulation of bodies and matter as a direct threat to neoliberalism and heteropatriarchies; third, she was interested in the very moment of annihilation and death, when the body and soul cease to share the same frame; and fourth, she wondered whether art\u2019s ability to suspend or extinguish the signified in favor of playing with flexibility of signifiers mirrored how Lucretius understood the Gods\u2013as perpetually unreachable and unknowable, and therefore as not really the point from which to justify \u201cour self-reflexive play.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Sincerest apologies for the delay! — I had a particularly rough go with my Booster shot.) Our final meeting began with recapping David Levine’s visit and analysis of the Adrienne Piper piece. Piper, by defining each discipline as a \u201chat\u201d of equal but non-transferable or integrative value, argues neither for interdisciplinarity nor antidisciplinarity as we … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Reflections on Week 11 (Brooke Holmes and Martha Friedman)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}