Body Image

In reference to BIID from last week, as a group we decided that there may be cultural elements involved in its formation.
Given that the emergence of BIID was out of the U.S. in predominantly male cases, the explanation for this was that people were identifying positively with amputee war victims, who were also predominantly male. Admiring the attention that these victims received, copycatting the physical appearance of these soldiers occured.
The same could be said in the 21st century of young women and men. Succesfful, affluent and filthy rich movie stars are successful and subsequently either ridiculously thin (women) or overly muscular (men) due to the scrutiny and pressure they are subjected to.
As a result, the rest of society looks to these icons and aims to copycat their appearance in order to emulate the same success as their favourite stars. this relates very much so to the Sobchack article we were reading this week.

As in this case, people focuse too much on their exterior, their outside, performative success (p. 186) and therefore become more detached from their visual image of themselves.
They get caught up in Iconomachy (of moviestars for example, or war veterans) and reject their current visual representation as acceptable. Meanings are produced from visual representation and this can not be ignored, but it must be remembered that human beings transcend and subtend the images that they produce. There is more so someone than their visual or virtual (facebook) representation.
the pictures of amputees or celebrities become aesthetic, iconic and not clinical as they were intended.

This article "Is Any Body Home?" helped me understand the underlying factors of body image disorders and how people can slowly dissasociate from their physical image. More and more so, we live in a visual culture where appearances do matter regardless of what any self help author may tell you.

You can either create you image according to God and serve him, altough I'd rather not, or through your visual appearance. it is important for your self confidence, your self awareness and even your success in a career. Body image says 'something true about your personality' and is often manipulated frantically on a monday morning before work in order to instantly portray professionalism.

Unfortunately, assumptions will always be made about your personality, self esteem, motivation, likes, dislikes etc purely on your visual appearance. 

Somthing characteristic of body disphorphic disorder, BIID and body image disorders is that our subjective imagining or ouselves and our objective imagining of ourselves can be vastly different (p. 170) As seen in this cartoon, someone suffering from anorexia will think they look fine in person but in a mirror or from the perspective of others they will be terribly unhappy with their appearance.

The most important thing to remember is that all these extreme versions of dysmorphia are changeable. They arise out of the misconception that the body is a fixed entity; people want their bodies to look a certain way of for it to stay the same. They must accept that the body is a malleable substance that is subject to constant change and influence from the environment around it (p. 203).

Bibliography : Sobchack, V. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley: University of Californica Press, 2004, 170-203.

Body Image Disorders

From maths to image disorders. Quite a transition in under a week.
This week we talked about Body Integrity Identity Disorder. 

-          A neurological disorder- The desire to have one or more limbs amputated to match the internal identity. 

 Some overlap exists between this disease and other body image disorders such as anorexia and body dismorphic disorder.  

The difference between a normal amputee and someone with BIID is that the former feels as if the limb is still there; the latter does not feel that anything is missing. They actually feel that their body is whole WITHOUT the limb, which is a thoroughly bizarre concept.

They do not feel diabled, embarrassed, or ashamed, but rather see is as an improvement of their appearance. Some people are even more excited by a partner with an amputation (Acrotomophile) or just plain love amputation (Apotemnophilia).

So what causes all this seemingly abnormal, insane behaviour? As usual, noone is entirely sure. It could stem from a neurological disorder that has been misdiagnosed, it could be a Freudian external result of an internal conflict, it could be an outcry for love and affection or they could be modelling behaviour form something seen as a child (war victims or relatives, helps them to perceive it as normal). 

Either way, all are deeply embedded psychological causes to do with the brain influencing the body and compelling it to amputate for one reason or another. 

This mental ongoing has mixed ramifications on sufferers (who don't actually consiously think they even suffer post amputation).

There are pretenders- people who pretend to be disabled but aren't. Or there are Transablers- people wanting to have a disease so that they amputate.

The internet is said to help the disease along by giving people more access to information, methods and images. Some methods are self inflicted unfortunately, which disguises the actual disease as a mere accident; a gun shot wound, using dry ice, lying on train tracks etc. It can be misdiagnosed as depression quite often.  Antipsychotic drugs are then prescribed but seldom quash the desire.

-          More men than women have this disorder. Possibly because of male dominated war zone and involutntary amputation and subsequent heroism.civil war.Women want more severe amputations done. 

The BIG issue-

amputation or no amputation?

If this is a legitimate disease i feel no reason for people not to amputate. If they are unhappy and feeling tormented by an extra limb, and their life will improve post amputation, i see no reason to question their motives. It is like telling someone that they cannot commit suicide. If a person is unhappy in their physical body they should be allowed to augment or to leave it as long as they do not pose risk or threat to any other human being.

Sights and Sounds Exhibition

- John Asliandis

Image From: http://www.theartscentre.com.au/discover/exhibitions-forums-talks-and-tours.aspx

 In this exhibition we looked at works that had been created whilst listening to a certain type of music or had been matched to music after creation. It was successful fusion of two creative outlets that felt more interactive than your usual exhibition. It went beyond the material limits of art and extended into the room around us, bringing together traditionally respected visual art with the newest form of art, music. It got rid of the hierarchy that exists in creative arts. Art was interpreted as an enduring expression that lasts longer than ourselves, art can be duplicated, music can be handed down.

We got to observe how our body responded to the music, how our mood was shaped by the sound and then expressed in a visual form. The body is then affected again as a voyeur; although not all reactions to art are the same they can be fairly similar if we are told how to feel by the tone of the music, thus by the artist who has made the work. It is an interesting philosophy. Work by John Aslanidis (above) certainly made others and myself quite nauseous when we subjected to its psychedelic, hypnotic visuals whilst listening to frantic, disorganised sound. The experience was similar to watching television or films. Through the use of images and sounds that relate to each other, the body can be affected and an emotion can be extracted from the viewer e.g. horror films- fear, comedies- laughter, romantic comedies- self pity and idolisation.

The Body and Maths

A quick reflection of Sean Cubitt and the body as a machine.
Sean did focus quite heavily on the negative impact that industrialisation has had on our physical selves. He had a quite Marxist approach to labour, working, the distribution of capital and the free market.


The positives that he seemed to overlook were how free markets and unreliability of employment has broadened peoples skill sets. Our generation is predicted to have a number of career changes and I dont see this as a negative at all. The more skills, the less boredom.
He also said that our bodies will not ever be able to live without machines. It is true, a little scary, but quite exciting. I love machines. Gadgets. Technology and machines along with science and western medicine have lengthened our life span and made us more productive. This ties in with how Stelarc saw machines as an extension of our body, an assistance to our limited capabilities. We are in a sense slaves to machines, always having to use them a certain way, repeating movements etc, but we hold the creating license to innovate them in order to make them better. And are they not slaves to us at the same time? programmed to do what we want?
The question is posed however, in many a sci-fi film; what happens when technology goes wrong? when human programmed robots attack our bodies instead of protecting them? This is where the Eastern thinking of Master Liu would chime in and say that the body can exist harmoniously without machines and often needs time away from them.
I must conclude that technology is an unavoidable means to an end. We need laptops, mobiles and the internet to survive globalised, capitalist society, but we also need to get away from them from time to time.

MATHS

Greg Hjorth presented the idea that pure mathematical theory is permanent, certain, immediate and precise.  It came from (rightly or wrongly decided) the Ancient Greeks. It came hand in hand with religion. Mathematicians were also deeply religious. Maybe this is why maths caught on so much, people before, people were natually compelled to believe in certain things; religion, maths, philosophical ideas.
Now we are much more free, religion is less common, yet maths is still an unquestionable constant. Were people less critical? less questioning? is it not time for a review of mathematics?

He aimed to highlight that althogh Mathematics has been created by the human brain and thus body, once it exists, it is more permanent, more correct, more unquestionable than our bodies. It is MORE of a machine than our bodies are claimed to be, because the theory, time and time again, will always work. Maths is thus a machine that always generates the right answer as long as you play by its rules.

In a world filled with human error where circles are never quite round, mathematics is a reliable procedure whereby if the rules are followed, the answer will always be correct; the circle always round. 

This is where the frustration lies whenever i try to interact with mathematics. all the faults are found in the human error and not in the theory, when, as an arts student, you wish and are told to challenge theory constantly. Your questioning and human error could one day prove to be philosophically profound.
Whereas maths is philosophy applied to numbers and NEVER REVISED. Unlike the body which is constantly revising and bettering itself through evolution, maths is this rigid structure that is for some reason, unchangeable.

Some parts of our body are unchangeable though. From the minute we are born we will look a certain way unless we happen to be in an accident. We are usually symmetrical, we usually have two of everything. So I guess maths can be applied to the understanding of our physical selves in some instances. And it does unite the world in an unprejudiced way, accross cultures, it is a shared cultural artefact.

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