http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Harris&feedformat=atomDead Media Archive - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T00:36:47ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.25.2http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9977Human Sacrifice2010-05-12T14:06:36Z<p>Harris: /* Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac0.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been deliberately broken off... the pelvic girdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off - mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
The body itself is not a site of inscription for a response to the sacrifice. But the process is not uni-directional. Gods or nature respond provide feedback, either through direct communication with the priest whose own body enters an altered state to become receptive to this response, or through the interpretation of omens that follow. The priests in that sense interface with god(s) or nature on behalf of the rest of the community. The god(s) that run the course of nature are the mystical kernel around which there is the rational shell of religious rituals.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac5.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice as Theater]]<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced him with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. It “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham.<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9976Human Sacrifice2010-05-12T14:03:31Z<p>Harris: /* Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac0.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been deliberately broken off... the pelvic girdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off - mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
The body itself is not a site of inscription for a response to the sacrifice. But the process is not uni-directional. Gods or nature respond provide feedback, either through direct communication with the priest whose own body enters an altered state to become receptive to this response, or through the interpretation of omens that follow. The priests in that sense interface with god(s) or nature on behalf of the rest of the community. The god(s) that run the course of nature are the mystical kernel around which there is the rational shell of religious rituals.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac5.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice as Theater]]<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9885Human Sacrifice2010-05-03T18:32:54Z<p>Harris: /* Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac0.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been deliberately broken off... the pelvic girdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
The body itself is not a site of inscription for a response to the sacrifice. The process is not uni-directional. Gods or nature respond provide feedback to the sacrifice, either through direct communication with the priest whose own body enters an altered state to become receptive to this response, or through the interpretation of omens that follow. The priests in that sense interface with god(s) or nature on behalf of the rest of the community. The god(s) that run the course of nature are the mystical kernel around which there is the rational shell of religious rituals.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac5.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice as Theater]]<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9808Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T20:11:49Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac0.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac5.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice as Theater]]<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac0.jpg&diff=9806File:Sac0.jpg2010-04-26T20:11:24Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9805Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T20:04:52Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac5.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice as Theater]]<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac5.jpg&diff=9804File:Sac5.jpg2010-04-26T20:03:50Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9803Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T20:00:48Z<p>Harris: /* Citations */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W. (1977) The Merchant of Venice. ed. 2nd Series. London: Methuen. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9802Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:56:57Z<p>Harris: /* Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|Burn Witch Burn]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9801Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:55:59Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac4.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac4.jpg&diff=9800File:Sac4.jpg2010-04-26T19:55:22Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9799Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:41:28Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." <br />
<br />
What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
<br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
<br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
<br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Arjun Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said, before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9798Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:28:49Z<p>Harris: /* Citations */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
<br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
<br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
<br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
<br />
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer. MIT Press.<br />
<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9797Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:28:15Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes what Crary (1992) would call a "screen or a membrane" on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. <br />
<br />
Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9796Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:18:34Z<p>Harris: /* Citations */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9795Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:17:43Z<p>Harris: /* Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (1977, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9794Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:12:28Z<p>Harris: /* Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
The scapegoat is one, against many, and is therefore defenseless. Like Oedipus, he is the stranger, the other, or the minority - which is as prone to being idolized and made into a hero as it is vulnerable to being seen as an impurity that is the root of all problems in the community. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. To blame him is a delusion that the society does not question or analyze. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9793Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:07:21Z<p>Harris: /* Citations */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Burkert, W. (1987). The problem of ritual killing. Hamerton-Kelly, RG (Hg.), Violent Origins. Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford, 149–176.<br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9792Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:05:11Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus can be seen as substituting their own body on the altar to facilitate an Aristotelian catharsis and purify them. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9791Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T19:02:22Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack, 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Aristotelian catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9789Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:59:40Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Aristotelian catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9787Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:56:39Z<p>Harris: /* Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons. To communicate with the supernatural, the absolute other, these weapons act not only as pens but before that as rubbers, dusters or scratching tools, to inscribe a completely different stylus and a unique encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9785Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:50:34Z<p>Harris: /* Scapegoat */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat: Logic of the Mob ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9784Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:47:50Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
[[Image:sac3.jpg|thumb|right|The Merchant of Venice]]<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give. <br />
<br />
If the welfare of the society can be gained in return for an individual's life, this exchange is economical. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
<br />
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke University Press. <br />
Atwood, M. (2000). The blind assassin. Nan A. Talese. <br />
Beattie, J. H. (1980). On understanding sacrifice. Sacrifice, 29–44. <br />
Girard, R (1987). Generative Scapegoating. In Violent origins. Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. (ed). Stanford University Press. <br />
Green, M. (2001). Dying for the Gods. Tempus Publishing, Limited. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac3.jpg&diff=9783File:Sac3.jpg2010-04-26T18:41:08Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9782Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:38:46Z<p>Harris: /* Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac2.jpg|thumb|right|Sacrifice of Isaac]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9780Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:38:09Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac2.jpg&diff=9779File:Sac2.jpg2010-04-26T18:37:34Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9778Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:34:35Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9777Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:34:08Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
[[Image:sac1.jpg|thumb|right|Human Sacrifice]]<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, 1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sac1.jpg&diff=9776File:Sac1.jpg2010-04-26T18:32:13Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9775Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:31:19Z<p>Harris: /* Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, an adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9774Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:29:33Z<p>Harris: /* Scape-goats: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goat: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9773Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:28:57Z<p>Harris: /* Scape-ram */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-goats: Sacrifice and Sons of Abraham == <br />
<br />
Theatrical practice began possibly with the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice. Dramatists are descendents of priests in that sense. Muslims all over the world sacrifice goats and rams every year to re-enact the story of Abraham who, according to the Bible and the Koran, was willing to sacrifice his son before God sent an angel who replaced it with a ram - for a remediation. <br />
An odd kind of descendants of the sacrificial priests are Islamic terrorists, especially those involved in the contemporary practice of broadcast beheadings, which began with the videotaped beheading of American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, “has grown into a more systematic tool of political expression”, according to Appadurai (2006), who sees the trend as a return to “the simplest form of religious violence, the sacrifice…” (p. 12). “My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish," Pearl said before he was beheaded and cut into 10 pieces - his killers replacing the goat back with a son of Abraham. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9761Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:11:17Z<p>Harris: /* Scapegoat */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
As a ritualized practice, this effect can also be seen in capital punishment, in which a body is sacrificed to an abstract transcendental concept of justice. The body is seen as an impurity, an agent that could hurt the balance of the society, and therefore must be removed for harmony and peace to prevail.<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9758Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:06:03Z<p>Harris: /* Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment through the use of spears, blades and weapons as different types of pens, form a different stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest.<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9757Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T18:04:33Z<p>Harris: /* Scapegoat */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
“What kind of logic is it that finds the cause of an epidemic in one man, but only after it was decided that this man had secretly murdered his father and committed incest with his mother?” asks Rene Girard (1987, 84) referring to the myth of Oedipus. There indeed is none, except the logic of the mob. “At the time of Black Death, foriegners were killed and Jews were massacred, and a centry or two later, 'witches' were burnt for reasons strictly identical” (86) to the ones in the myth of Oedipus, Girard argues. <br />
“At the instant the scapegoat is selected, through a nonconcscious process of mimetic suggestion, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent, a more powerful case than he really is.” (ibid, 91). <br />
The choice of the scapegoat is arbitrary. Scapegoating in itself is functional nonsense. It does not follow a logic. “The agitation and fear that preceded the selection of the scapegoat and the violence against him are followed, after his death, by a new mood of harmony and peace” (91) and that is the function that the ritual serves.<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9755Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:56:02Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9754Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:55:28Z<p>Harris: /* Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
The sacrificial body is also used as a site of performance. Inherent in the very meaning of the "ritual" is a reenactment of a prior event. While a debate on the primacy of ritual or myth remains unresolved, ritual in itself, as a cultural practice, is nothing but repetition. For Walter Burkert (1987, 151) it involves “action patterns used as signs” and is therefore “a form of nonverbal communication”. The sacrificial body then becomes a screen on which this communication is projected. It is erected on an altar and therefore given a central position and made the primary site of action. Rituals "introduce embellishments" (Mack 1987) and allow the use of "a surrogate victim" - violence against home can suffice to replace more generalized violence. "Ritual provides the example", as it "makes substitutions" (ibid, 17). For onlookers, this apparatus is remarkably similar to the theater that facilitates Platonic catharsis. This effect is re-mediated by the theater, long after human sacrifice has become outdated.<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9742Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:39:28Z<p>Harris: /* Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, food and security are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then the body that they nutrition and protect belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice. <br />
<br />
The flesh and blood, even if they belong to the gods, are of no use value to the the gods, however. They do not need it. “There's more depends on this than on the value,” Balthazar says of the ring in the Shakespeare play. The value of the sacrificed body is merely exchange value. They are being given back to gods only with the expectation of tangible returns. Do ut des – I give so that you may give.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9734Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:30:03Z<p>Harris: /* Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice */</p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
But the body is not mere carrier of a message. In a second sense, the flesh and blood are themselves the objects of exchange. If life, health, flesh and blood are considered to have been bestowed by a supernatural being, then they belong to that being. According to Karl Marx (Capital, Volume 1, 400) what is loaned by a lender to a plebeian becomes “transformed through his consumption of the means of subsistence, into flesh and blood”. The flesh and blood are therefore the lender's money. This phenomenon, he says, “is worthy of Shylock”, referring to the character in Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice.<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9720Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:21:25Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
At the center of this communication with the supernatural is the body. The body is the site of inscription. Not merely cultural inscription in a Foucauldian sense, but of a different type of inscription - a symbolic code that shared between the priest and the gods. Archaeologists come across bodies butchered with blades, crushed with blocks of flint (Green, 2001). "A dismembered torso of a six-year-old boy, placed there after his legs had been hacked off," (53) and in a pit alongside, and adult female whose body had been "drastically mutilated" (54). "Her head lay apart from her trunk and both femurs had been dliberately broken off... the pelvic gurdle itself had been crushed by a huge block of flint." What is already inscribed on the body is scratched off, and mutilation, dismemberment and disembowelment form a new stylus and a new encoding that the body is usually not meant to bear. As a site of inscription, the body becomes a palimpsest. <br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
It is not only <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Human_Sacrifice&diff=9682Human Sacrifice2010-04-26T17:03:17Z<p>Harris: Created page with ' ''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded …'</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
''“Thus, tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce, each girl would be led in procession to the sound of solemn music, wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers , up the winding steps of to the city's ninth door. Nowadays, you might say she looked like a pampered society bride.” - Margret Atwood, in (2000, 209).''<br />
<br />
Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. And so does terror. Human sacrifice was a dramatic combination of both. It was simultaneously a spectacular show of the aesthetics of making holy (Beattie, 1980) and a terrorizing venting of collective violence (Girard, .1987). As a religious ritual practiced globally and throughout history, human sacrifice involved killing of victims in order to communicate with or please a supernatural recipient, “in order to acquire benefits for an individual or a community” (Green, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br />
== Postcards to Gods: Body as Palimpsest ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Exchange Value: The Economics of Sacrifice ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Ritual as Reenactment: Sacrifice as Theater ==<br />
<br />
<br />
== Scapegoat ==<br />
<br />
== Scape-ram == <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8725Grand Guignol2010-04-12T18:05:23Z<p>Harris: /* References */</p>
<hr />
<div> <br />
[[Image:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was a theatre in Paris popular between World War I and World War II known for its naturalist horror shows with explicit violence. The 293-seat venue, the smallest in Paris, opened in 1897 as a naturalist theater staging taboo performances involving prostitutes and criminals. But the theater soon became a house of terror, featuring insane characters engaged in explicit acts of rape, brutal murders, disembowelment, and dismemberment. But the audience dwindled after World War II as real-life violence overshadowed that of the Grand Guignol, and the theatre closed down in 1962.<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|left|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|left|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]]<br />
<br />
Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<br />
[[image:Grand.jpg|thumb|left]]<br />
<br />
Viewing Grand Guignol as a cyborgian apparatus of human, animal and machine highlights not only the mechanical components analyzed thus far but also the various outputs produced by the 'running' of the machine. The circuits of attention between actor and audience, flesh and object are viscerally electrified, creating automatic reactions which feed back into the stage and drive the machine forward in it's production of horror. The primary input in this apparatus can be seen as the performative act on stage. Defined much more by the depiction of spectacular violence, madness, disease and corporeal dismemberment than any given arbitrary narrative of the plot, most intellectual interaction is passed over. Film maker David Cronenber describes the exchange of horror as going "right into the viscera, before it gets to the brain" (Hand and Wilson, 71). The analytical mind plays little role in these automatic reactions to the stage, muscles get tense, heartbeat quickens and nerves jangle, even if the story has been seen before (Brophy, 279). There is a guttural dialogic of reactions spoken out through shreirks, grunts, moans, flailing of limbs and fainting;these actions are not controlled, but arise in the particular situation of the constructed horrifiable subject. As automated cathartic responses of a horrifiable body, these actions are, despite their semiotic meaningless, a performative act that runs willy nilly on and off stage, through plot and atmosphere, actor and audience. <br />
<br />
The audience, prepped to experience fear, receives the violent images, processes them vicerally and produces not only gutteral jerk responses as immediate calls back to the stage but also, at times, a more subtle output of erotic arousal. The intimacy of the space, both in closeness of audience to stage and between viewers canoodling in the dark, is rife with opportunity for impropriety. The performers would engage the audience in suggestive eye contact, implicating them in their violent acts and providing a conduit for voyeurism, "the relationship becomes almost one of pornographer and consumer of pornography"(Hand and Wilson, 44). The sexualization of fear feeds back into the apparatus-of-horror, further implicating the audience-body, as a subject who both consumes and produces arousal as a cogs integrated into the working machine. The output of this particular reception of fear is physical in it's nature, According to Agnés Pierron (cited in Hand and Wilson, 74) "cleaning ladies would find traces of sexual pleasure from the audience". In her own study of the form, she comments: "It was well-known that during the notorious Monday matinees, that women would prepare for adultery by snuggling, half-dead with fear, into the arms of the man in the next seat" (ibid). In these situations, the reactions that were claimed to be involuntary and visceral, are hacked to be used for a completely different purpose - clandestine sexual pleasure. This deviant use of the norms did not depend not on a malfunction, but was made possible through the proper functioning of the stage as the primary director of attention, creating a space of secrecy in the seats.<br />
<br />
== Suspension of Disbelief: The Audience as the True Actor ==<br />
<br />
The final component, critical to the functioning of Grand Guignol as an apparatus-of-horror, lies in the audience's suspension of disbelief. Although violent murders enacted using animal parts and fake weapons are likely enough to elicit a reaction, the true terror it sought out to evoke depends on the conditioning of the psych of the audience-mind, achieved through the willing entrance into a state of known falsehood. The willing participation of the subject in this horror machine speaks to a desire for 'safe' entertainment which is achieved only through a conscious forgetting of that very fact, that this is all a big bloody show. Indeed "Grand-Guignol offered a chance to be scared in complete safety. Most people are vicarious lovers of violence and danger, and the majority of people find the theatrical depiction of violence to be cathartic...to release their own sadism and/or masochism." (Hand and Wilson, 68). Only by suspending one's awareness of the pops and hisses of production, the visual cues that the heroine is actually still breathing after being sliced and garroted, the mismatch of the bang of the revolver and the blood fountain from one's chest, or the vague sound of the cast member who, instead of being burned alive is instead smoking a cigaret backstage, which is, incidentally a place which acts as a black box primarily in the audiences desire to wish it away. The logistics of live theater intrude upon the illusion, requiring mechanisms of denial in the audience to function properly. Bad weather of cynicism, distraction or disengagement shatter this illusion and cut the circuit of reciprocal horror production. The knowing suspension of disbelief speaks to the subject's self awareness of the manipulation of perception, understanding the visual experience as a subjective and imperfect mechanism of the flesh, manipulatable by oneself in pursuit of reactions of fear, arousal, entertainment and catharsis. This truly non-automatic action, a prerequisite for membership as part of the functioning apparatus-of-horror, that is Grand Guignol, shows the audience as the true performer, the causa sui of the machine itself, without which there would be no one to horrify.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. SH Butcher. ReadHowYouWant.com, 2006. Web.<br />
<br />
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. Rabelais and his world. Indiana University Press, 1984. Print. <br />
<br />
Brophy, Philip. "Horrality - the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films." Ed. Ken Gelder. London: Routledge, 2000. 276-84. Print.<br />
<br />
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. MIT Press, 1992. Print.<br />
<br />
Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. Grand-Guignol: the French Theatre of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter, 2006. Print.<br />
<br />
Haraway, D. “A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980's.” Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge (1991): n. pag. Print. <br />
<br />
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, grooves, and writing machines. Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. <br />
<br />
Flusser, V. The shape of things: a philosophy of design. Reaktion Books, 1999. Print. <br />
<br />
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. A Sheridan. Penguin Harmondsworth, 1977. Print. <br />
<br />
Pierron, A., & Treisman, D. "The House of Horrors". Grand Street No 57 (Summer 1996). 87-100. Print. <br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8673Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:01:17Z<p>Harris: /* References */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|left|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|left|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. SH Butcher. ReadHowYouWant.com, 2006. Web.<br />
<br />
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. Rabelais and his world. Indiana University Press, 1984. Print. <br />
<br />
Brophy, Philip. "Horrality - the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films." Ed. Ken Gelder. London: Routledge, 2000. 276-84. Print.<br />
<br />
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. MIT Press, 1992. Print.<br />
<br />
Haraway, D. “A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980's.” Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge (1991): n. pag. Print. <br />
<br />
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, grooves, and writing machines. Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. <br />
<br />
Flusser, V. The shape of things: a philosophy of design. Reaktion Books, 1999. Print. <br />
<br />
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. A Sheridan. Penguin Harmondsworth, 1977. Print. <br />
<br />
Pierron, A., & Treisman, D. "The House of Horrors". Grand Street No 57 (Summer 1996). 87-100. Print. <br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8664Grand Guignol2010-04-12T16:39:18Z<p>Harris: /* Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|left|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|left|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8663Grand Guignol2010-04-12T16:38:26Z<p>Harris: /* Apparatus of Horror */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|left|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8662Grand Guignol2010-04-12T16:37:52Z<p>Harris: /* References */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8660Grand Guignol2010-04-12T16:36:49Z<p>Harris: /* Apparatus of Horror */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harrishttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8659Grand Guignol2010-04-12T16:35:41Z<p>Harris: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
intro intro intro intro intro intro intro <br />
<br />
<br />
== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<br />
<br />
Essentially functioning as a circuit of horror, the primary mediatic dimension of Grand Guignol can usefully illustrated in terms of a sense of "stageness", that is, a reciprocal connection established between audience and actor through mutually corresponding vectors of attention. Although the actors possess the primary role of performatory output, the audience takes on a similarly active role of reception and response. Arguably the relation between actor and audience can be seen as that of two stages, related in varying degrees of primacy. Although the actor traditionally occupies the 'primary stage' and the audience as the 'secondary stage' relational politics of Grand Guignol imbues the audience with a high degree of agency, creating an active communicative circuit between the violent spectacle of the actor and visceral reaction of the audience. Casting the audience as "meaning-makers" Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dynamic" (77). As observed by Hand and Wilson, the stageness of Grand Guignol is characterized by this equal partnership, a circuit embedded in the larger conceptual apparatus-of-horror; a machine constructed from flesh, seats, darkness and illusion. These cogs work in synchrony, producing and consuming fear, disgust and sexual arousal in a complex web of input and output, in which "form and meaning are negotiated and created" (Hand and Wilson, 77) in the synaptic space between actor and audience and powered by electric viscerality.<br />
<br />
=== Apparatus of Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
<br />
The functioning of this conceptual horror-machine is dependent upon specific interaction between structure and flesh, the makings of the machine. The small stage and cramped seating further conflates the audience/actor bodies through tecnics of claustrophobic closeness; illusion of dismemberment literally spray in the face of the audience. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's examination of the cyborg, Grand Guignol brings together the tripartite of man, animal and machine (Haraway, 151). Using animal organs to mimic human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific dissection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically disassembled, revealing their organs as mechanical parts. In his study of optics, Johannes Müller similarly describes the body as "a multifarious factory-like enterprise. . . the organism becomes equivalent to an amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses" (Crary 89). Conversely, Vilém Flusser identifies machines as "simulating organs of the human body" (Flusser, 51); the body and machine cry out to each other in their mirrored likenesses. Beyond the obvious illusion of theatrical effect masquerading as corporeal violation, viewing Grand Guignol as this apparatus-of-horror uncovers the hidden illusions that lie in the proposed divisions between audience/performer and man/machine.<br />
<br />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
<br />
The crux of the horror-machine that is Grand Guignol is surely the performatory stage upon which the body of actress Paula Maxa "the most assassinated woman in the world", among many others have been "'cut into ninety-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stitched back together in two seconds by a Samaritan; flattened by a steamroller; disemboweled by a slaughterman who steals her intestines; shot by a firing squad, quartered, burned alive, devoured by a puma, crucified, shot with a pistol, stabbed, raped and still she stays happy and smiling'" (Hand and Wilson, 19). Though illusory, these acts are the loci of fear, creating the message that is delivered through the circuit of attention and connection between the actor-body and audience-body. Philip Brophy describes this connection in terms of textuality, coining "Horrality" as "the construction, employment and manipulation of horror--in all its various guises--as a textual mode" (Hand and Wilson, 70). Horrality then, casts the body-as-paper to be inscribed upon by the slice of the knife-as-pen, creating a text to be read and deciphered as raw fear. Here the message embodies in the spirit of Iris in the most literal of ways, the violated body as message. Though horror as text is surely an act of writing, the inscription of the knife functions only to establish the actor/audience connection through nonsensical viscerality, a call returned through a jerk of the hand over ones eyes, a flinch, or a scream; these call back to the stage, writing of the horror just witnessed. <br />
<br />
===Don't Cut My Döppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
<br />
<br />
In the moments of theatrical engagement the audience/actor body is only precariously divided, merging in horrified empathy, as two sides of one self. The audience flinches as it's döppleganger is battered and cut, the exhilarating fear possible only in a transposition of the audience-self onto the actor-self, confronting the audience with its own mortal corporeality through the illusory acts on stage. The cutting of the actor-body represents an opening up of the audience-self, guts literally displayed, making one's inner world outer and demystifying the black box of the body. Jonathan Crary identifies a corresponding intellectual move as a shift in the mid-nineteenth century towards an awareness of the "corporeal subjectivity of the observer" (69) and an increasing understanding of "the empirical immediacy of the body" as "belonging to time, to flux and to death" (24). Through this confluence of identities, the audience-body becomes aware of itself as vulnerable, disassembleable, and ultimately meat. The division of bodies must be thinly maintained, however, because in this separation lies the possibility for entertainment rather than a submission to complete debilitating terror. Grand Guignol carefully negotiates the terror/entertainment line by straddling past and future, familiar and fanciful. One one hand, fascination with the violated and dissembled body can be attributed to a remediation of the horrality of both public torture and surgical theatre, examples of fear and fascination respectively that have historically drawn people toward displays of violence. On the other hand the acts depicted are illusions, on some level known to be fake and many thought to be pure fanciful imagination. It is only when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain.<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
<br />
Much in the same way that Crary (1992) sets out to question the ways in which techniques of observing are constructed and learned, Grand Guignol requires an examination of the ways in which the audience is trained to experience fear through creating the conditions of possibility for "automatic" reactions of horror, in a sense, setting the dials of the horror-machine. Hand and Wilson illustrate the processes as, "Not unlike a death-defying carnival rise: the subject is a willing target that both constructs the terror and is terrorized by its construction'" (70), a comparison which highlights the subject as both acting and being acted upon. [change/more here] The assemblage of physical space as well as the shaping of the audience-psyche contribute to the creation of a 'horrify-able' subject, creating a space for the experience of horror. <br />
<br />
=== Carving out a Space for Horror ===<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
<br />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audience has begun to engage with mechanisms of the horror-machine. Often situated in something like, "a narrow dead-end alley... culminating in the barely lit facade of the theater” (Degaine 1998, 196), the theater internalizes the very message it is set to convey – terror. Even the act of arriving serves to tenderize the subject, creating an expectation of fear. Upon arrival a medical staff evaluates the audience's health, pre-emanating a sense of threat to the body and legitimizing fear through scientific queues (Hand and Wilson, 72). The proposed danger lie in being 'overcome' by the horror witnessed, granting fear a level of power usually reserved for direct corporeal violence. As a machine which produces fear, this internal perpetuation and legitimization is self sustaining, creating a twin fear of the fear experienced in the theater. The presence of doctors in the theater creates an expectation space for a medically classified physical reaction, one which could indeed set the stage for an 'automatic' fear reaction by suggesting a pathological connection between stage-act and audience reaction as well as between audience reaction and audience health. The audience-body visually consumes the simulated violence of the stage, ingesting the constructed pathogenic force of the experience and transforming it into a real violence against the body in the form of sickness from fear. The ill audience-body, thankful for the medical assistance, fails to recognize the white coat as the origin and exacerbator of the nausea, revealing the audience-body as shaped by the Weberian cage that is the horror-machine.<br />
<br />
=== Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body ===<br />
<br />
The horrify-able subject is uniquely defined by the act of witnessing the stage. Crary's analysis of the phenakistiscope raises the issue of positioning, "the very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production" (112). Though the connection between actor and audience has been already identified in terms of 'stageness', to further examine the production of the horrify-able subject constructed through its interaction with the greater apparatus of Grand Guignol a discussion of the spatial particulars is in order. Crary suggestions that the positioning of a subject in relation to the apparatus shapes the role and identity of that subject. Within the apparatus-of-horror the positioning of the audience-body in relation to the actor-body largely determines the conditions of possibility for action, interaction and reaction. Crary identifies this positioning of the subject as coinciding with "procedures of discipline and regulation," illustrated through the structure of seating (112). The audience-body is confined to a regulated direction and distance from the stage through seats designed to ensure that “no member of the audience felt far from the performers and vice versa” (Hand and Wilson, 31). This positioning lends greater freedom of movement and attention to the actors, defining the audience as the subordinate receiver. The stage commands the optical field as the main source of light, directing the audience's gaze by illuminating the 'right' object of attention. In this way, the theater acts as an optical device of the 19th century, which according to Crary (1992) “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. They were techniques for the management of attention" (18). In this arrangement, then, members of the audience become examples of Foucault's (1977) docile bodies, subject to the manipulation of body and attention. Even among this structured discipline of arranged bodies, there is also a degree of freedom in the disorder and chaos.<br />
<br />
Even as it controls and shapes audience attention, the structure of the horror-machine can also be seen as creating a space for a messy and chaotic actor-audience interaction, pulling the audience-body into the performance through through a clash roles. The scream of the victim rooted merely in a theatrical representation of fear is challenged by the authenticity of the audience, shrieking out in sincere horror thereby upsetting traditional role of active stage and passive seat. Within the performative act itself, there is an interplay of light and darkness, where disorientation and visual obstruction collide with the stage as the principal source of light and information, rendering the audience-body docile in its ignorance of what to expect next, but active in it's visceral reactions and bodily excitement. The uncontrolled reactions of the audience-body, together with the violent chaos of the stage create a vicious orchestration of a collective, "carnivalesque body" (Bakhtin, 219), a disordered and leaking circuit of fear, excitement and arousal.<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Harris