The Poetics of the Body is a University-wide Breadth Subject offered through the Centre for Ideas to University of Melbourne undergraduates. In 2008 it will be offered as a 1st Year University-wide Breadth Subject.

This subject will explore the ways in which historical and contemporary discourses are constructed around the human body in the visual and performing arts, politics, law, philosophy, medicine and science. Within university departments, study of the human body is the object of discrete and sometimes competing areas of knowledge. The Poetics of the Body challenges this compartmentalization. It offers a wide, multidisciplinary perspective on the body.

During the Renaissance the practice of drawing upon various traditions – humanist and scholastic, literary and scientific, theoretical and practical – led to rich theoretical interpretations and representations of the human body. Much of this knowledge was framed by deep spiritual, aesthetic and ethical concerns. Since the 17th century, investigation of the human body has splintered into discipline-specific fields of study. By the beginning of the 21st century the fragmentation of knowledge about the body has dominated. The Poetics of the Body offers a unique and inclusive approach. The assumption is that the body can direct research. It is not only an object of investigation, but also the vehicle through which knowledge of the world is gathered.

Underpinning the Poetics of the Body is a recognition of the value of interdiscipinarity and the role it plays in invigorating and enriching critical vocabularies and representations. There is also recognition of the value of theory derived in practice. Through experiential studio/ laboratory, and lecture/ tutorial based learning, students will explore the ways in which historical and contemporary discourses are constructed around the human body

First, Second, and Third Year

Visual and Performing Arts, Anthropology, Architecture, Indigenous Studies, Islamic studies, English, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Behavioural Science, Anthropology.

No prerequisites for the First Year.

The Poetics of the Body aims to:

• Introduce students to historical representations and interpretations of the body;
• Familiarize students with a range of discipline-specific technical and theoretical terms by bringing them into plain English to facilitate communication;
• Enrich student’s vocabularies and to explore a range of assumptions within disciplines, eg: the “objectivity” of science verses the “subjectivity” of aesthetic judgement;
• Provide the ground for new modes of understanding and representation of the body;
• Integrate practice with theory through aligning studio/laboratory with lecture/tutorial based learning;
• Contribute to and enrich current debate on the human body;
• Engage students with culturally diverse practices and customs associated with the body;

The Poetics of the Body starts from the premise that the body is not only the object of investigation but the medium through which this investigation takes place. It explores ways of knowing through the complex dialectic that develops between the human body and its physical and intellectual environment. Experiential and experimental studio /laboratory work will be integrated with more discursive, theory based learning to enhance student’s conceptual, analytical and critical skills.

By integrating traditionally discrete, discipline-specific bodies of knowledge, including pedagogical practices, methodologies and values, into a broader educational context, the Poetics of the Body will generate new modes of understanding and representations of the human body.

• Intellectual Journal: (30%) the journal will serve as repository for ideas taken from lectures, tutorial/ workshops, readings from the Course Reader, as well as performances, exhibitions and museum visits. Students will map and connect ideas encountered in this subject to their main disciplines. The journal should reflect each students growing intellectual curiosity and capacity to link specific themes to their broader context. Diversity of writing, graphic notation and imaging will be encouraged. The journal is also a place to record the different vocabularies and definitions encountered in lectures.
• Project: (40%) project to include both theoretical and practical components . Students will select from a menu of projects.
• Group Presentation: (30%) Students will form small groups to present to the tutorial group some of the key ideas from the weeks reading from the Course Reader.

• Dr David Bennett (School of Culture and Communication, Department of English, Arts)
• Dr Barbara Bolt (School of Culture and Communication, Department of English, Arts)
• Professor Paul Carter (Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning)
• Dr Justin Clemens (School of Culture and Communication, Department of English, Arts)
• Professor John Clement (School of Dental Science, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry, and Health Sciences)
• Dr Simon Cropper (School of Behavioural Science, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Dr Health Sciences)
• Professor Sean Cubitt (Media and Communications, School of Culture and Communications, Arts)
• Dr Adrian John Gully (Arabic and Islamic studies, Asia Institute)
• Helen Herbertson (Dance, Victorian College of the Arts)
• Dr Eugen Koh (Senior Lecturer Art in Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Director of the Cunningham Dax Collection)
• Dr Tamara Kohn (Department of Anthropology)
• Professor Marcia Langton (School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, Arts)
• Dr Vera Mackie (The Department of History, Arts)
• Professor David Macmillan (Zoology, Faculty of Science)
• Associate Professor Campbell Paul (Department of Psychiatry, Medicine)
• Dr Elizabeth Presa (Centre for Ideas, VCA)
• David Shea (Centre for Ideas, VCA)
• Leisa Shelton (Centre for Ideas, VCA)
• Dr Frances Thomson- Salo (Department of Psychiatry, Medicine)
• Amanda Whiting (Law School)
• Professor Alison Young, Department of Criminology

Dr Elizabeth Presa
The Centre for Ideas
Faculty of The Victorian College of the Arts
The University of Melbourne

234 St Kilda Road
Southbank, Vic 3006
Phone: + 61 3 9685 9343
Fax: + 61 3 9682 1841
Email: epresa@unimelb.edu.au

First Year
Subject Code 800166

LECTURE PROGRAMME SEMESTER 2, 2008
VENUE: Federation Hall, 234 St Kilda Road VCA ( cnr St Kilda Road and Grant Street)
TIME: MONDAYS 12.30-2.00PM
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WEEK 1 – JULY 28
Why we bother to breathe in and out
David Shea

dshea@dshea.net
dshea@unimelb.edu.au

David Shea is a composer working with combinations of samplers and live musicians, centered on the possibilities of electronic and acoustic traditions. David teaches at the Centre for Ideas when he is not touring internationally.


This rather humble title will involve a look at the connections between forms of cultures , the sciences, technical work and meditation through the filter of music, films, architecture, spiritual traditions, language and composition. Weaving my own musical works and collaborations in and out of a history connected to many others works, this talk will take a step into the connections that lie at the heart of of why and how we create and what we do in any discipline.

Key words:
Making work and looking at the whole of it
The personal and the technical
Meditation and the sciences
The connections between all disciplines
Ways of looking at time and traditional views of the body

Essential readings:
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Krishnamurti, J. and David Bohm. The Ending of Time. London: V. Gollancz, 1985, chapter 3, “Why has man given Supreme Importance to Thought?”, pp. 49-76.

Further Readings:
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1961.


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WEEK 2 – AUGUST 4
The Prosthetic Body
Stelarc

stelarc@va.com.au

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist, born in Limassol on the Island of Cyprus. He moved to Australia, where he studied arts and craft at T.S.T.C., and art and technology at CAUTECH and M.R.I.T., Melbourne University. Stelarc moved to Japan, where he found the technological environment in which he could produce his work. He taught art and sociology at Yokohama International School, and drawing and sculpture at Ballarat University College. Since the late 1960's, he has performed extensively in Japan, Europe, and the USA. Aside from traditional venues, his work has been included in a variety of new music and dance festivals as well as in experimental theatre. Through the use of medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet, Stelarc explores alternate, intimate, and involuntary interfaces with the body.

Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntarily – conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words, we have always been coupled with technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become – Zombies and Cyborgs.



Key words:
Prosthetic body
Cyborgs and Zombies
Performative body
Human and machine
Suspension

Essential readings:
Brian Massumi, “The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason”, in ed. Marwuard Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005, pp. 124-90.

Further Readings:
Elizabeth Grosz, “Refiguring Bodies”, in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994, pp. 3-24.
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, in Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York : Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-81.


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WEEK 3 – AUGUST 11
Neuro what?: brain matters for the body conscious artist and designer
M.A. Greenstein

M. A. Greenstein, is the Founder and Director of The George Greenstein Institute for the Advancement of Somatic Arts and Sciences; and Adjunct Assoc. Prof., Art Center College of Design, Colorado.

The 21st century is being defined by a breathless race to understand the role of the evolving human brain and peripheral nervous system in all matters of human experience and consciousness. For the artist and designer, the race beckons our pattern recognition attention for it is here that we enter the discussion of systems orchestration, mirror neurons and neuroplasticity -- three areas of specific and whole brain function that hold tremendous potential for reckoning with the mysteries of aesthetic perception and the brain/mind/body connection. This talk is dedicated to raising the issue of neuroaesthetics and its value in cultivating a somatic based aesthetic practice.

web links: www.artbrain.org/journal3.html; spacesuityoga.wordpress.com (my blog)

Suggested reading: Sharon Begley, train your mind, change your brain; Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee: The Body has a Mind of its Own.

Key words:
neuroaesthetics
mirror neurons
neuroplasticity

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WEEK 4 – AUGUST 18
The Unconscious Body: Sigmund Freud and Sexuality
Justin Clemens

Dr Justin Clemens is a senior lecturer in Culture and Communications at he University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and literature. Recent books include The Mundiad (Blackinc 2004) and, with Dom Pettman, Avoiding the Subject (Amsterdam UP 2004). He is co-recipient of a large ARC grant with Russell Grigg on "Psychoanalysis and Science." He is currently Secretary of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne, and art critic for the Australian magazine The Monthly.

Sigmund Freud believed that psychoanalysis had issued the third decisive blow to the narcissism of humankind. Copernicus had shown that humans were not the centre of the universe, and Darwin had shown that humans were just another animal. For his part, Freud thought he had shown that human beings remained forever unconscious of the real motivations for their acts; moreover, that these motivations were linked to infantile sexual traumas. This lecture outlines Freud’s basic psychoanalytic propositions about the unconscious body, as well as how and why he came to hold them.

Key words:
The unconscious
Sexuality
Narcissism
The pleasure principle
The symptom

Essential readings:
Sigmund Freud, “Distortion in Dreams,” chapter 4 from The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), volume 4 of the Penguin Freud Library, pp. 214-48.

Further Readings:
Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious”, in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), volume 11 of the Penguin Freud Library, pp.167-210.

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WEEK 5 – AUGUST 25
Visit to the Cunningham Dax Collection
With Dr Eugen Koh, Director of the Collection

The Cunningham Dax Collection consists of over 12,000 creative works on paper, paintings, ceramics and textiles, created by people who have experienced mental illness or psychological trauma. The Collection is dedicated to the conservation and ethical exhibition of these works, and the use of art in public mental health education.

We will meet at the Cunningham Dax Collection about 12.30.pm
Address:
35 Poplar Road
Parkville Victoria 3052
Australia
Phone [+61] 3 9342 2394

Driving
The Collection is within the grounds of Orygen Youth Health. Drive along Royal Parade (from the city), turn left into Walker Street which becomes Poplar Road. Drive past the Zoo, cross the railway line and turn left about 150 metres down the street into the entrance of Orygen Youth Health. The Collection is the last building on the right.

Public Transport
Tram 55 (from Domain Interchange runs along William St in the City through Royal Park to West Coburg ). Get off at Stop 26 near Royal Park Station and proceed as described above (5 minute walk).
Train (Upfield Line) to Royal Park Station, walk away from the zoo, along Poplar Road as described above.

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WEEK 6 – SEPT 1
Sculpture and a Poetics of the Body
Elizabeth Presa

Dr Elizabeth Presa is a sculptor and installation artist who often works in collaboration with writers and philosophers. She is currently working on video installations based on works in the collection of the Louvre Museum. She is the Head of the VCA Centre for Ideas.

This lecture looks at the intersecting themes of aesthetics, ethics, perception and interpretation surrounding the human body. The focus of the lecture is a short monograph written by the young German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke who arrived in Paris in 1902 to write on the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. Here the theory of the ‘Transitional Object’ proposed by the British child psychoanalysist, D.W. Winnicott, is introduced. The second part of the lecture examines how states of embodiment can enter into creative dialogue with work. We look at a short text L’ Intrus (The Intruder) by the contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, who constructs an ethics of the ‘stranger’ through reflecting on his medical condition and heart transplant. We will also look at the work of the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo.

Key words:
Phenomenology
Embodiment
Transitional object
Potential space

Essential readings:
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Rodin-Book: Second Part”, in Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Quarter Books, 1986), pp. 45-71.

Further Readings:
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus”, in The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), pp. 189-207.
“L’Intrus”, The New Centennial Review, 2.3 (2002), pp. 1-14.

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WEEK 7 – SEPTEMBER 8
Martial Arts and the Body
Master Liu

Master Liu is the 5th generation inheritor of the Liu He Zi Ran Men lineage. He began his study of martial arts at the age of eight with Master Hong Zheng Fu and legendary Grandmaster Wan Lai Sheng. After graduating from Beijing University Of Physical Education, Master Liu accepted a teaching post at the famous Shaolin Temple. Subsequently, he spent 12 years teaching at the Fujian Institute Of Physical Education. He has lived, taught and trained in Melbourne, Australia since 1992.

The universe is in a state of perpetual change - nothing remains the same. Within this constant change, there are patterns and cycles which we can learn to observe and anticipate. This understanding makes it easier for us to harmonize with our environment and plan our actions.
Taoist and Buddhist philosophies have deeply influenced Chinese martial arts. Many of the arts arose as a combination of spiritual practices, health practices and self defence techniques. Taoism may be translated as 'The Way'. Covering every conceivable area of human thought and action, Taoist philosophy provides guidance through understanding the many different paths that constitute a way of life.

Key words:
Taoism
Buddhism
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WEEK 8 – SEPTEMBER 15
Human Epigenetics
Assam El-Osta
Assam El-osta is head of the human epigenetics laboratory within the jdrf diabetes and metabolism division, Baker Heart Research Institute. HTTP://BAKER.EDU.AU/CONTENT.ASPX?TOPICID=205

Epigenetics is the study of reversible changes in gene function, changes that occur without any mutation in the sequence of the DNA itself. Epigenetics concerns itself with trying to understand how information that regulates gene behaviour but that is not expressed in DNA sequences can be passed on from one generation to the next. Most of the diseases we seek to prevent and cure at the Baker have both genetic and environmental causes. Understanding their interaction is a key step in developing our research.

Key words:
Misbehaviour of genes
Switching on
Switching off

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SEMESTER BREAK: 22 & 29 SEPTEMBER
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WEEK 9 – 6 OCTOBER
"Which Other, Whose Alterity?: The Human After Humanism"
Krzysztof Ziarek

kziarek@buffalo.edu

Krzysztof Ziarek is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Buffalo Univeristy. He teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. His newest work, The Force of Art is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Alterity and difference have been for a while now the central issues in
philosophical, cultural, and political discussions, which have increasingly taken on an ethical tenor. The intensifying process of globalization, with the global operations of capital and the world market, the advances in communications and genetics, and the problem of difference and multicultural societies, has only added urgency to the question of rethinking the place of the human in contemporary world and the ethics that could follow from such a reconceptualization. What complicates the situation further is the precisely question of what kind of ethics the 21st century needs: one based on the centrality of the human, one that would also include animals, or perhaps a more
capacious environmental ethics, with the global environment at stake. Many philosophical discussions of these issues have been informed by Levinas’s notion of radical or absolute alterity, the idea which underlies his strenuous polemic with phenomenology and Heidegger’s thought in particular. My aim here is not to resuscitate this by now quite old polemic but to explore instead the stakes of the often neglected or unremarked difference between l’être and Seyn, and the
implications this difference has for what can be seen as the differently ethical tenor of Levinas and Heidegger. Keeping this difference between l’être and Seyn in mind, I want to point to two crucial points of proximity between Levinas and Heidegger, so far mostly ignored in the critical discussions of their work: the dignity of the human and the problematic of power. If in Levinas the dignity of the human is owed to the alterity of the other human, in Heidegger, that dignity comes from the capacity of the human to be Da-sein, specifically to be-there as
the site for being to give there to be (beings) in a way which would remain free from power. In this paper, I question the commonly held idea that Levinas’s thought has to be opposed to Heidegger’s, because, as Levinas himself claims, the thought of being is inimical to ethics. To that effect, I show how Heidegger’s approach to being is differently ethical from Levinas’s thought, since Heidegger’s is non-anthropocentric world-wide ethics, emphatically displacing the
human from its position of reference/centrality.

Essential readings:
Martin Heidegger,"Letter on Humanism"
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WEEK 10 – OCTOBER 13
"Towards A Feminist Aesthetics of Embodiment: Speculations after Hegel and Modernism"
Ewa Ziarek

Ewa Ziarek is Park Professor of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She teaches feminist theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. She is the author of the Rhetoric of Failure: deconstruction of skepticism, reinvention of modernism. (suny, 1995), An Ethics of Dissensus: feminism, postmodernity, and the politics of radical democracy. (Stanford 2001); an editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: modernism, gender, nationality, (suny, 1998); and a co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: the Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (forthcoming) and Intermedialities: philosophy, art, politics (forthcoming). she has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon and literary modernism. Currently she is working on a book devoted to feminist aesthetics.

Essential readings:
Ziarek, Ewa. “Bare Life on Strike: Notes of the Biopolitics of Race and Gender”
SAQ Special Issue The Agamben Effect, ed. Alison Ross, (Winter 2008): 89-105
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WEEK 11 – OCTOBER 20
Factories, Offices and Networks: The Body at Work
Sean Cubitt

scubitt@unimelb.edu.au

Sean Cubitt studied at Queens' College Cambridge and McGill University, Montreal. In the 1980s he worked freelance in art schools, community arts, journalism, the Open University and as National Organiser for the Society for Education in Film and Television. He spent the 1990s in Liverpool, where he became Professor of Media Arts at Liverpool John Moores University, and was involved in developing the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT). In 2000, he moved to New Zealand with wife Alison and dog Zebedee, where he was Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato. In 2002 he was appointed Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee and moved to the University of Melbourne as Professor of Media and Communications .

During the 19th century, the model of the steam engine provided a new way of considering the body as a source of power. From this basis, there developed time-and-motion studies, chronophotographic analyses, and the principles of ergonomic design. This lecture explores changing conceptions of the body at work in the three characteristic phases of work practices since the 1830s, investigating design and communication factors in the evolution of considerations of the body.

Key words:
Fordism
Taylorism
post-industrial
ergonomics

Essential readings:
Braverman, Harry (1974), Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, New York. Chapter 20 “A Final Note on Skill”, pp. 424-49
Rabinbach, Anson (1990), The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity, Basic Books, New York. ”Conclusion: The End Of The Work-centred Society”, pp. 289-300.
Thompson, E.P. (1991),'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism' in Customs in Conflict, Penguin, London, pp. 352-403.

Further Readings:
Sewell, Graham (2005), 'Nice Work? Rethinking Managerial Control in an Era of Knowledge Work', Organization, Vol. 12, No. 5, 685-704.


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WEEK 12 – OCTOBER 27

PRESENTATIONS AND EVENTS EXTRAVAGANZA!

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Weekend Intensive Seminars at the VCA:

Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 September (10.00am - 5.00pm both days)

Or

Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 September (10.00am - 5.00pm both days)

Details will be distributed in tutorials and posted on LMS