[-empyre-] Bare Life and Exposure : The Big Hard

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

>

Michele wrote:

> Roger M. Buergel intriguingly suggests,
> "absolute exposure is intricately connected with
> infinite pleasure." To further understand these
> connections, considerations of the array of bodies,
> looks, and forms of exposure that produce these
> pleasures are needed.

considerations to happen where?  in contemporary art? in interactive  
new media?

> Looking and being looked at can
> be satisfying. However, extreme and long lasting forms
> of pain also accompany such things as regulating
> stares and medical gazes. Exposure should be
> correlated to the histories of visibility and
> invisibility that different cultures and individuals
> face. Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured
> faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are
> likely to associate exposure with different pleasures
> and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker,
> adjunct, "alien," juvenile, fan producer, and sex
> worker. I am interested in considering the different
> ways that bodies are put on display, the various
> demands for exposure, and what it means when people
> decide or are forced to become visible in the world.

 I wonder, if those distinctions start to mesh and blur when  
everyone is under suspicion, under another gaze, a gaze from the  
state wanting to subject everyone to itself via the state of  
emergency?  in the name of security?  are there 'occupied bodies' in  
New Orleans... (sounds like a  question for the Vampire LeStat :-),  
but seriously.   New Orleans used to be known as the "Big Easy."   
Post-Katrina, Michele, you've turned that idiom upside down with your  
exploration of  ' the Big Hard" :

> As grrrl grrrl and an academic, I have been using the
> phrase "big hard" to represent themythosmythos of New
> Orleans as the Big Easy and the current struggles that
> all residents and evacuees face with navigating an
> infrastructure that is still partially broken and
> continues to fail on a regular basis. The big hard
> also represents the struggles residents face when
> correlating the media production of New Orleans with
> the diverse places we live. ...


> It is difficult to correlate
> the everyday shifts between individuals'
> experiences--although these shifts are to different
> degrees-- with the big hard, bare life, and situated
> pleasures and rewards. I also use the phrase "the big
> hard" in order to represent how empowered
> masculinireinstitutedituted with popular media
> indications that women are simply the object of the
> gaze and are stupid when they willingly exchange views
> of their bodies, or "flash," for cheap beads in the
> French Quarter and other New Orleans locations. Such
> narratives displace the ways women visually boast
> about their place in a visual economy of looks by
> acquiring and displaying large numbers of beads.


is the big hard also something like, being an object of desire/gaze  
from the media (so you can say what you think the journalists want to  
hear when you get an interview on the street_?


Giorgio Agamben is a political philosopher who has written on 'bare  
life' .  Agamben looks at a state of emergency: in your world, in New  
Orleans, its a state of emergency of a special kind in which the  
infrastructureof the city is fragmented ,
> >  still partially broken and
> > continues to fail on a regular basis.


are people neutralized, 'are stupid'  in the 'big hard' ?

-cm
>