Sean Cubitt and the body as a commodity

Women throughout the ages. working hard or hardly working.

17th century- hardly working- sitting around looking good because that was all that was legally required or allowed.

18th century, slimmer, still pretty bored and dissatisfied but at least working somewhere for something.

post industrial revolution, the human body working as a well oiled machine.

The post-modern working woman whose life is seemingly better, less physical output, more rewards, contentment? questionable.

In the Ancient world aristocrats did as little physical work as possible. that was for servants. appealing yet horribly politically incorrect. Work was ignoble. With time the definition of work has evolved and means more than physical exhertion. Now people can't get enough of it. as soon as our labour became our only way of making any money people HAVE to work all the time.

What has been lost in history is work being a way of keeping fit, for the most of us. Labouring is less popular and office jobs are booming, causing us all to use our minds more, our bodies less, and carry tyres around the middle while doing so.

There is no set amount of work to do that is governed by the seasons. The weekend will cease to exist. There is no down time. There is no break. We are capable and pushed to work longer and harder than ever before but not in a physical sense most of the time.

During the 16th and 17th the British, Dutch and French colonised the shit out of the rest of the world. They did something far worse than Hitler ever did, killing more and over a longer period. They took away land rights, took away religion and made labour the only commodity. The human body was turned into a commodity which you sell by the hour. Industries were sexualised; women were cheaper, efficient, often died by 42, sacked by 36 when their eyesight gave way and before that subject to compulsory prostiutionary.
This is nothing different to what we see today in off shored  multinational trade houses built in obscure east asian countries within free trade zones (and therefore outside of local juristiction).
Women work at 16, are fired as soon as they're pregnant, are forced to undergo pregnancy tests routinely, have 28 day long contracts with their employer, contraceptive pills are handed out at work; it is literally either choose between motherhood or money for your own survival. Nothing seems to have changed at all across centuries. (taken from  Klein, Naomi. "The disgarded factory: Degraded Production in the Age of the Superbrand" No Logo. New York: Picador, 2000. 195-230)


When wages rely on low education level and repititive easy tasks, education is witheld, labour becomes dirt cheap and inequality increases.
Here are some interesting view points of the modern day body, how it works and how it is treated.

Spencer, O.- Bodies run by a clock and not by the sun. They live and work in houses and and offices with no natural light, they are becomming machines that don't fluctuate between productivity and idleness along with the seasons.

Helmholz- the master of thermodynamics. Humans are essentially a form of machine that you put fuel into and extract heat energy from. Energy is transferred and never lost.

Marx- Machinery is the invention of a vampire that will continue to haunt Europe, commanding humans to obey it and adhere to its rules; alienating the worker from their production and taking  all the credit.

INFORMATION ECONOMY
we are now living in the information economy where information can be sent and received faster than human speed. 
Historical bodies still exist, there are still labourers, aristocrats etc and they all co-exist at the same time.
In the future we can all expect to be relied upon to process and make sense of a multitude of information at a super human rate, much like a computer; we can only dream.
We are disembodied aristocrats that find it a lot easier to kill eachother by being far removed from situations





Buzz Berkely Clip- humans as art at work.

Freud Reflection

On closer inspection of Freud i have come to realise how truly quirky he is. He reminds me of one of those know it all children that you fight with who have an answer for everything; always winning arguments. Its only later that you go home and think of a comeback and realise that they were convincing, quick witted and yet entirely wrong; in your own opinion.


Dreams are distorted realities that contain wish fulfilment that are distorted in order to repress the wishes that aren't fulfilled in waking life. Much like how people are said to censor their thoughts during the daytime in order to remain polite, they do it in their sleep as well.


Freuds theories are cyclical: there is always a cause and an effect and that effect creates cause and so on. So I think this coupled with the fact that there was noone at all like him who has gained the trust of so many patients created a tremendous following. Whether his theories were at all correct is still being debated constantly today. The fact that we are still being taught about him only shows that he was influential and like noone else of his era, not that he was correct.
Its funny to think that psychoanalysis has become so popular that people are now using it on Freud himself. I wonder if he was ever truly a neutral voice or whether his desire to find revelation from earlier life eventually got the better of him, causing him to make some up?
All this from the same man that thought cocaine was the miracle drug in 1885.


Do all neurotic patients have dreams of a sexual nature? Do all dreams have this underlying sexual tone? are babies all incestuously attracted to their mothers? I would say no, assuming that something in Freuds own mind willed it so. Could he merely be a hysterical case with similar life experiences to his patients, thus indentifying and assimilating with them?

How Charcot and Freud treated patients seems similar to meditation in a way. It gets rid of all negative thoughts and anything related to trauma to create a more relaxed state in their patient.

What aggravates me is there is always counter arguments for any Freud sceptic from EVERY angle.
-people don't want to analyse dreams because they don't want to deal with the suppressed material in them (anyone anti dream analyses and anti suppression theory)
- all dreams have secret representative meanings linked to wish fulfilment. Or could this just mean they are distorted purely becaue they are ambiguous? not becuase they actually mean something?
- He uses seemingly unrelated events of the previous day to explain the dream that just happened. Of course things that happened the day before will be in the dream, it doesn't mean the dream itself actually means a thing.
- dreams often have more than one meaning (a.k.a. if you don't like his first meaning he will happily make another one up for you)
- If a woman says that he is wrong, and have a dream that has no wish fulfillment in it, he merely says that their WISH was for him to fail, and therefore they have fulfilled their wish by having that dream, therefore Freud is right again. Or does he simply have a good answer to every question?

Loving Kindness Meditation

Having been to a free lecture organised by the Melbourne University Buddist Studies Society I thought the topic roughly related to Master Lius eastern thinking lecture.

Its called the art of METTA meditation.
Similar to Liu, Buddhist Nun Venerable Dhammananda Bikkhuni believes that meditation can quieten the mind and allow an increase in our productivity.
In order to cultivate healthy emotions inside our bodies, they can't be stressed or doing too many things at once.
As Liu described the lifetime as a subsciption to various doctrines, Bikkhuni used the analogy of carpet to explain that no one carpet (religion) can cover the entire world. If we have protective slippers however (a strong belief of our own) then we are able to protect ourselves from that which we disagree with and assimilate with others harmoniously.

The most intriguing and obvious point was that our own happiness or unhappiness can all be controlled with our mind as long as it is strong. If our minds are not skillful and resilient then we can get hurt by others easily.
With strength comes the ability to not hurt others with our actions or words and not not be hurt by others.
It all sounds very fantastic but how to we do that?

Meditation is where it all starts. Its the usual deal. Let go of all of your anger for others in order to find peace within yourself. Bikkhuni does this by picturing the tenderness, kindness and honesty of small babies. So try thinking of small babies next time you meditate.

This acceptance has to extend to everyone. It has to be of all four types of people, lovers, friends, indifferents (strangers) and enemies. The stranger part seems stupid but think about how often during the day you get annoyed at cars swerving into your bike lane for example; they're strangers and they're annoying.

You need to know your own personality and be alright with all of it. If you aren't then it is impossible to love someone else properly. You won't be able to accept their bad qualities either. This is where the analogy "you hate others because they are a reflection of a part of you" comes from.

It all starts to sound very simple, if you omit/emit good energy then you will receive this from others with minor exception.
- you also have to ask for nothing in return. which would be difficult. something i'm not sure i'll ever be able to do. for example it would be hard to love someone and never expect them to love you.
- if you hate your mother or father then you essentially hate half of yourself and have not come to terms with it yet.

It is always important to remember that behind all nastiness is a reason, some underlying problem in someones life that treating them like an enemy will not fix. (This sort of sounds like Freuds idea about everyone having a hole in them that they are despereately trying to fill).

Heres the good part, after you've finally embraced your crappier side and unconditionally loved people and only put out good energy and meditated about all of this for a really really long time, the following may or may not occur

- higher levels of concentration
- protection from angels (she said it not me)
- you will have a beautiful face that never carries any sign of stress (always a plus)
- you will be incapable of killing others
- You will cease to have bad dreams because you are dealing with all problems in the conscious mind and they do not seep into your unconscious (something to tell Freud)
- you will sleep easy and feel rested when you wake up
- you can't go to hell (not sure if that even exists but would be a good precautionary measure)
- you will have a good relationship with all types of people
- you will seldom feel confused and your mind will remain clean.

My question is when are you supposed to get angry? If someone does something unprovocably horrible to you, are you supposed to just accept that? I could not think of anything worse than creating a pushover exterior for yourself. It will create a mentality that the behaviour is tolerable and therefore correct.
I think before all this accpeting and loving etc happens you need to get quite angry about things in order to stick up for yourself and prevent them happening again.

There is also a question of acceptance versus pushing yourself. How would anyone ever personally improve if they accepted their emotional state as it was and didn't progress? I guess you'd have to accept in order to progress so that each minor progression is just seen as an added bonus on top of something you're already happy with.

And thats all I've got on Loving-Kindness Meditation

All babies are perverse until they're not

According to Freud they are. I'd have to disagree. Just because your mother is the one that carries the food you need when you're a baby doesn't make you a perverse creature.

This week we looked at all things psychological and how our bodies are controlled by our conscious and subsoncious minds.

"Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them. - Sigmund Freud"

Oh dear Freud. I can hardly believe everything this man says, considering he smoked long filthy cigars even after he got jaw cancer.

All this theorising came about because Freud and an associate started listening to middle class, Jewish women who were experience pain and had no physiological reason for it occuring. Hats off for being the first doctor to listen to women of that time.

From this research sprung the notion of hysteria; neurological weakness that manifests itself as physical pain.

This psychich pain lodges itself in the physical realm, hiding the relation to the real problem.

Instead of fixing the physical, Freud wanted to attack the real problem, the mind being overloaded. He aimed to do this by getting the women to talk the problems out of themselves on the all too famous divan. The illness is holes in your ability to cope, holes in your memory. By speaking, you are filling these hole with language.

A perfect exmaple of physical pains/symptoms masking the real problem is in eating disorders. All you see is an extremely thin individual that needs to be told to eat more but after many years doctors have realised that this isnt the case at all. Bronte Cullis wrote a great book on it that is fairly freudian, its called "Bronte's Story"

A psychological problem causes the physical symptoms. Feeling of lack of worth, guilt, anger etc go along with eating. It is a form of schizophrenia in a way. There are constantly two minds talking at once inside your head, one pleading you to eat, one definitively saying you can't. The book tells a fascinatin tale of how Bronte finally quietened that negative voice but could never completely silence it through continual psychotherapy.

Back to Freud.

Through 'free association' you can say anything, relevant or irrelevant, because if you say only relevant comments you will be self sensoring your thoughts and potentially sensoring the real problem.

The Pleasure Principle- We act on what we want. Until it is deemed socially unacceptable by our parents, we'll do it, we'll steal, we'll grab, we'll snatch. Humans are merely hungry sexual beings that are after one of those things all of the time.

Essays on Sexuality- This is where the freaky baby quotes come in.

all female babies are born as incestuous lesbians and are taught/conditioned to act as a respectable member of society throughout their lifetime by parents/friends/anyone.

Controlling our orifaces is something i took for granted. I forgot that i ever couldn't use them in the way i could today. i thought that just naturally happened as you got older. Obviously through repitition, praise and punishment it did, but it was a learned behaviour and not innate.

The mind is supposed to be made up of the unconscious, conscious and the super ego. The super ego is the voice Bronte talks about in her book. It is an endlessly unsatisfied voice that controls behaviour. it causes guilt and blackmail. it controls physical behaviour, the more you give to it the more it will take from you. Sounds menacing!

Humans are also thought to be cut from one of two cloths. the neurotic pervert or the psychotics. there are a lot of perverts in the law apparently because they enjoy catching other people doing bad things. makes sense. shouldn't be dating a law student though. I just found out a bit too much about them.

Apparently we all have holes that we desperately try to manage so i might go and figure out what that acutally is and then desperately manage it.

Reflections on Master Liu.

It's great to hear a completely different doctrine to the one you've heard your entire life that thinks stress and overwork is bad and should never happen. The next time i don't blog post for a week or two at a time, you'll know that it is merely due to stress build up, an imbalance of my internal energies that I am attending to and not pure laziness.

I always thought stress was good for productivity though? Isn't the way we have all been conditioned to think? If you want to get something done, give it a deadline, create stress, stress leads to action, the task gets finished quickly. I've always thought of a certain degree of stress being somewhat helpful in an essay deadline crisis. I thought it made my work better.






According to Liu, if you live like this, one deadline to the next, your body never replenishes, it never relaxes fully, it goes from one stress peak to another, it gets overworked, then you get sick, then you really aren't capable of productivity because you're bedridden.
I liked the analogy brought up in class. Life is like a cup of dirty water. If you are still you create clarity, if you are stressed your judgement of it will be eternally clouded.
As energy hits peaks and troughs you can stabilise it by clearing it from your meridian; somewhere I assume....near your belly button.

The integrity that comes with this sort of ideology is dependant on its history. It has been around for thousands of years. The frustration lies in the slow reaction time. Teas and herbs are great, but sometimes you just need the anti-biotics and you need them now and if you dont get them now you can't finish the assignment by tomorrow, you will have less time for the next one, you won't be able to go to so-and-so's 21st; everything will get ruined clearly without the antibiotics.
I often think of eastern medicine much like the greens. you should vote for them, you know they will do whats best, but sometimes whats best will take way too long and you want your life to be good right now. but i will vote for them and i will...one day... start my meditation again.

Meditation facts
-induces sleep quite often afterward.....and a lot of the time during
- is supposed to create an out of body experience.
- is supposed to give your brain time out from thinking
- you think about nothing in meditation, easier said than done.
- makes you feel more rested than when you started.

Circadian and Cyclical time.

Circadian is what we in the west are used to. the sun rises, the sun sets, then theres the moon, once thats happened thats a day, you never get that day back again and so on. Time flows from an upper recepticle to a lower one, left to right, moving constantly forward and never back,

Cyclical, would you believe, runs in a circle. Much like the zodiac, each specific time in that circle is revisited and carries with it specific qualities. This is why people born in the same year are said to have similar qualities....which i am terribly sceptical of, a lot of people the same age never have similar qualities. Alas, I'm the year of the horse, all other 1990ers are too.






Apparently I am rigid, forceful, amibitious, self reliant and business oriented? They had me until business oriented. couldnt care less.





Its the same in politics. the West, stemming from greek mythology uses rationality, logic, majority vote. Chinas history points toward using what has come before, relying on tradition rather than innovation. on Yin and Yang. Apparently Yin along with meaning passive means evil, dark, corrupting and female. interesting.

 Back to Liu, this circlular/cyclical mentality finds its way into all of his martial arts moves, if you do something to one side you have to do it to the other. Its about balance and being cyclical.

 Even the approach to excercise in the east and west is different. Gyms are about strenous excercise that ups the heart rate, gets you sweating, no wonder i hate gyms. easter is about not causing injury, preventative care for your body, trying to align the body and mind, rectifies your normal appetite, possibly giving you less reason to do strenuous excercise? maybe?

Master Liu- Eastern Medicine

This week we sat in awe of Master Liu; eastern medicine expert and martial arts extrordinaire.
It didn't take long for me to realise  that the east and west have completely different methodologies when it comes to....well....everything. The east works together toward common goals, the west work alone for individual ones. The east believe in long term family style relationships, the west are generally more cut throat.

What appealed most was the theory behind overwork. If you work too hard or too long at something, this creates worry, fear, anxiety, subsequent, inaction and unhappiness.
There are so many natural signs that we ignore in order to create a better life for ourselves. Maybe it is a lot more simple than we think. We never give in when we know we are tired. When we're sick we rarely take it easy. We study subjects knowingly hating them in order to earn more money. These negative energies, according to Liu need to stop being ignored. It will work to our advantage if we listen to these energies and do what our body tells us to do in order to keep body, mind and spirit in harmony with each other.

Or, as Liu puts it, Qi- energy, Shen- Spirit and Jing- body. The philosophy revolves around harmony and acceptance.

Picture at: http://chancetoheal.com/tag/meditation/

Yin/Yang- I always roughly knew what this meant, knew what the little symbol looked like, knew it was good for something. What I didnt know is that you couldnt live without it. You cant live without both strength and weakness in your life. There is always a time for weakness and a time for strength. Out of softness springs hardness and is sometimes essential; especially in martial arts. Moving from slow fluid movements to a hard strike just may well save your life one day and take your opponent by surprise.

Stress- something we all know and love. and yes, he had advice for this too! it is an inhibitor of getting things done, like it or not. It hazes your mind and causes incorrect judgements, an altering of your personality, generally making you a pain to be around. Through meditation you can learn how to eradicate stress or minimise it.

Above all, no mindset suits one person for their entire life, so maybe a switch to a more eastern way of thinking would do us all good, for a while, until the next thing comes along.

Reflection on Stelarc

After a brief discussion about the wild and wacky world of Stelarc on Monday, some conclusions were made; feel free to disagree.

Sterlarc crosses the moral boundaries for the majority of society. This has made him loved, hated and famous. He is always going for the shock factor in his work, for example he almost always performs nude, with or without an audience. Or he might just like being nude.
Above all the meaning deciphered from all works combined was 'mind over matter'. Using mental strength to overcome physical pain, social conformity etc.
An interesting point we mentioned regarding second life (online experiment where you create your own avatar and basically do everything you'd usually do but in a virtual realm) is that technology removes emotion from situations and can promote cruelty. I completely agree. Thats why cyber bullying is increasingly common and malicious.
Another example of this is the new remote war technology being produced in the U.S.



This involves fighter jet pilots operating their planes from an office, from a desk, in an ordinary building. Its a 9-5 job, close to home, so there are perks created. The disturbing part is how much it resembles a video game, how little emotion is involved when you are that far removed from what your are doing. and how many more mistakes are likely to happen, how many innocent civilians might die if we employ this technology to warfare?

I struggle to see what Stelarc is achieving through all of his experimental installations/art. I know you could easily argue that art is not about achieving it is about raising awareness and creating change; i just don't see any practical applications to his work. I also can't think of where any sort of financial support would come from.

It is very much a male, external, exhibitionist style of art that treats the body like a machine.
There is a need for reason and a need for moral boundaries for this type of work at the same time these sorts of boundaries shouldn't impede on freedom of expression. it is a hard line to draw.

Lets just hope that in the coming years Stelarc maintains sanity, "Increasingly, i feel like i don't have my own mind"- Stelarc.

The Cadaver the Corpse and the Chimera

From the Lecture 02.08.2010
The body was treated as an art installation this week by the Australian artist Stelarc.
There is literally no form of physical torture, manipulation, disfigurement or mutilation that could not
be categorised as part of art for this guy. Confronting at first but thoroughly fascinating, his art has become a media frenzy since the 60s because of its crude nature and limitless creator.
The most famous and confronting installations was in the 70s when Stelarc suspended his body on hooks in various locations, once even in a street of New York without permission. As Stelarc remarked his intention was to make the body involuntary and at the mercy of external force. 
His current projects include reinventing the self online, having an online identity; something that couldn't register as anything less than The Sims with me; a fad that has come and gone.
The level of shock everyone experienced at the lecture wasn't enough to stop us from peering at the prosthetic ear Stelarc has lodged under the skin of his left arm. Curiosity got the better of us.
What struck a nerve is how he completely disregarded his physical needs and often put himself through pain for the sake of art. For example gagging when he tried to lodge a metal 'sculpture' into his stomach repeatedly seemed a bit extreme.
Extreme is the category that you would have to put Stelarc in. His new work, as he ages and mellows perhaps, is less physically invasive and thoroughly interesting. He concerns himself with how man and machine can work together, how movement can be created in machines by mind control. The future for humans seems to be one where robots do everything and are controlled by human minds, making the body more or less redundant.

Above all I admire his originality but would never think of my body or use it in similar ways. ever.

 Image courtesy of: http://www.tii.se/at/page/5/

No idea where this Massumi article is lurking so comments on Bohm from week one will have to do:
'Why has man given the supreme importance to thought?'-Krishnamurti, J. and David Bohm 1985

Bohm seems to think that there is no meaning of life, humans just go on living and thats that.
The less religious people come, the less meaning there is in everything and the more anomie is created.
Apparently facts are in the way psychologically, I think its merely a way of organising information into 'forgetable' and 'unforgetable' so that our brains can properly process all the information it gets bombarded with.

Krishnamurti believes that if enough people believe in something publicly then it suddenly becomes fact. I would certainly say that about religion.

So basically, scientists have it wrong, all religions have it wrong, and these two can't decide who has it right. All human beings are irrational creatures and let their irrationality get in the way of decisions, what they choose to believe and who they converse with.
I don't believe that peoples backgrounds shape how they think as an adult. Plenty of adults do not think the way their parents thought or hold the same values. But they certainly are irrational, curious, looking for answers constantly; whether there are answers or not is an undecided matter.