The Mystory: The Garage D'Or of Ereignis (original) (raw)

“The Mystory: The Garage d’Or of Ereignis.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses. (RAEI). 2013 volume on "Performing Culture, Performing Identity."

The performance of identity involves impression management, social skills, and self-reflexivity. To perform identity in media environments involves writing our identities into being. Media environments have facilitated a new kind of selfhood-brand-in which we model our identities on celebrities. However, because brand identity has no ethical grounding, it raises legitimate concerns. To incorporate ethics, I perform my identity through mystory, Gregory Ulmer's genre of reflexive writing. By composing a mystory, I consult with an avatar-which in Hindu tradition was a god descended into earthly form-that reveals my ethical condition and a pathway through it. This consultation functions as pharmakon , revealing truths to me which both wound and heal. I use mystory to address a personal question, "How do I lead an ethical life?" and a policy problem: water pollution in Florida. The conclusion of this essay presents a response to this problem: a performance art piece designed to teach manatees about mortality.

A transfictive tale: life of the artist as a self-brand

2017

The body serves as a critical site of identity performance particularly when considering the implications of technology on construction of the self. This thesis investigates the growing interest in the development of transfictive artists as art practice and how through the use of multimedia platforms it is possible to create and establish a fictional identity through transmedia storytelling. Each of the fictional artists selected for this research, namely Susan Fielder, Donelle Woolford, Cherry Lazar, Ona Artist and Seren Sancler, function to draw the audience into exploring issues of identity, performance, in particular, the artist persona as exemplifying selfebrity. This original contribution to knowledge explores the ideas, concerns and ways of creating a transfictive heteronymic persona in relation to gender politics, the ways in which media convergence is utilised to develop identity, performance and the importance of self-branding. The case studies are discussed in relation to...

Subjects, Identities, Bodies, and Selves

Some contemporary ecological fictions offer complex representations of their characters that can play an important part in developing a potentially less destructive form of human self-perception than the one dominant in the cultures in which these works are written. To understand those representations, I consider the four categories in my title in terms of a literary ecology grounded in the materiality of existence, showing how each one may be necessary but is insufficient to define an individual person. This analysis, ranging from postmodern theorists through genetic development systems theory and a variety of literary texts, leads to the conclusion that we are better served by the multiplicitous concept of being subject-identifiedbodily-selves rather than any singularity. ¤ Over the last few years and in the course of teaching a variety of environmental novels, I have had certain issues attract my attention that raise theoretical questions about the treatment of humans as agents and subjects in general, and

Narrative identity, practical identity and ethical subjectivity

Continental Philosophy Review, 2004

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not-as has been naively suggested elsewhere-the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard's work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective-the reflective structure of human consciousness-arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity.

Bare your self naked for creation. Notes on impersonality, the encounter and a body for a life

In works previous to Thousand Plateaus (2005), such as Logic of Sense (1990), Gilles Deleuze stresses the importance of the impersonal as the dimension one must reach in order to counter-effectuate the Event. Impersonal, or neutrality, is a characteristic of singularities and of the Event. Although Deleuze never relates the Event to an experience, regarding experience as an event is our answer to such a question as the becoming-imperceptible or the radical affirmation of any body as a haecceity. Impersonality is a way of allowing the becoming. However, there seems to be a misuse of the notion of becoming as a process of deconstruction or transformation, underlining or enforcing the self instead of dismantling it. Patricia MacCormack's (2011) defense of the lizard-man, and the cat-man, as both bodies in-between and becoming, is such a misuse. Their and Body Art practitioners attempt of overcoming the Self and a subjectivity through the excess and extreme emphasis of turning all bodies “as aesthetic events which can experience and are experienced through zones or folds of proximity” (198) not only falls on the field of mimesis and representation, as they inflate subjectivity and a fixed Self. Turning the body into an event calls for a re-questioning of an ethical-aesthetic êthos, one which seeks to free life (DELEUZE, 1996) through the creation of encounters, and a much radical de-personalization of the self. This de-personalization or impersonality understood as an elimination process of subjectivities and selves determined by the socius follows Deleuze's Bartleby (1993) three characteristics, plus one: a trait of expression, a zone of indeterminacy, a fraternal function and a subjective-significative nudity. This is a fundamental dismantlement through a «leap of the will», as to achieve that composition in which we are a life in the same immanent plane as everything that composes Nature (DELEUZE, 2005). This is an impersonality towards life and creation (close to asceticism), one could argue, opposed to an imposed depersonalization of death and destruction (close to death camps' bare life). Nevertheless, for a body to become the event that it is, i.e., a body for a life, one must also address art's territory. First as an encounter (an ethic-aesthetic realm), which can produce what we call the space of the Event, following the idea of taking extra-daily practices and techniques into daily life. Art is too mediated/mediatic and mediates too much (perceptions and experiences). It is most of the time a stance for the production of the monolithic​ Self. To release both Life and Art, affects and percepts, from their shackles, one must avoid and produce actions and situations evading the alienation and fetishism of forces, close the gap of mediation between subject and object of experience. Hence, we propose to rethink Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (1994), as a possibility of how to deterritorialize and produce encounters in daily life. A practice of immediatism: creation happening outside Art.

Dissertation Defense. An Arts of Existence in the Post-Media Era: A Theory of Subjectivation

Toward the end of their lives, both Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari sought to develop a mode of the production of subjectivity that unbinds itself from hegemonic norms thereby launching what Foucault called an arts of existence and Guattari called existential self-fashioning. This dissertation attempts to update this form of subjectivity curation and creation and bring it into the present-day by taking into account the way that subjectivity has become mediatized and interlinked with various gadgets, beings, and other-than-human entities. The analysis relies on the procedure of metamodeling, derived from schizoanlaysis, in order to construct traversally a system of reference that would slice open the normal sense and gloss that is intrinsic to normative semiologies. This methodology undergirds and guides the theoretical findings of this project, which argue that the now networked nature of being human calls for a neoanimist cosmology that not only decenters the anthropos from its privileged place in the most epistemologically shared sense of the word world, but, even stronger, horizontalizes its privilege on power, obviating its move to raise itself above other beings that it finds in the environment it inhabits. By undercutting the propositional nature of human exceptionalism, it follows that the production of subjectivity can be pushed into channels that are not caught in subjection, policing and homogenization, but into modes that induce processes of subjectivation, the creative self-fashioning of one’s life. Figures like the cosmopolitan idiot, the clown from the carnivalesque, and the performance artist are submitted as prototypical models that help subjectivity mold its being away from subjection and towards a reclaiming of beinghood in the contemporary, mediatized milieu. The way that these embodied tropes and existential scripts are arranged and ordered exposes an encrypted system of reference that deploys the same logic as emblems found in the aesthetic of the baroque. Subjectivity is, paradoxically, a kind of artifice that is more real than the predicates that would make it fake.