http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Rooney.meg&feedformat=atomDead Media Archive - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T06:25:52ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.25.2http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Rocket_Mail&diff=9863Rocket Mail2010-05-03T17:35:06Z<p>Rooney.meg: Created page with 'Category:Proposed Dossier'</p>
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<div>[[Category:Proposed Dossier]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Rocket_mail&diff=9862Rocket mail2010-05-03T17:33:00Z<p>Rooney.meg: Created page with 'category:proposed_dossier'</p>
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<div>[[category:proposed_dossier]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9729Code Duello2010-04-26T17:25:40Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:duel01.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==''Point d'Honneur'' - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the ''point d'honneur'' illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the ''point d'honneur'', in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world.<br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the ''point d'honneur'' as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
[[File:Duel1.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Duel01.jpg&diff=9728File:Duel01.jpg2010-04-26T17:25:31Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9724Code Duello2010-04-26T17:22:44Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==''Point d'Honneur'' - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the ''point d'honneur'' illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the ''point d'honneur'', in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world.<br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the ''point d'honneur'' as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
[[File:Duel1.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
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<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9722Code Duello2010-04-26T17:22:07Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==''Point d'Honneur'' - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the ''point d'honneur'' illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the ''point d'honneur'', in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world.<br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
[[File:Duel1.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9719Code Duello2010-04-26T17:21:17Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==''Point d'Honneur'' - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world.<br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
[[File:Duel1.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9718Code Duello2010-04-26T17:20:00Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
[[File:Duel1.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Duel1.jpg&diff=9714File:Duel1.jpg2010-04-26T17:18:54Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9712Code Duello2010-04-26T17:18:17Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour" (22).<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
[[File:DuelingPistol.gif|400px|thumb|right|Dueling Pistol]]<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:DuelingPistol.gif&diff=9707File:DuelingPistol.gif2010-04-26T17:17:00Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9701Code Duello2010-04-26T17:15:41Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9700Code Duello2010-04-26T17:14:43Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|thumb|400pixel|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9699Code Duello2010-04-26T17:14:15Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
[[File:Duel_2.jpg|thumb|right|]]<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Duel_2.jpg&diff=9698File:Duel 2.jpg2010-04-26T17:14:04Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9695Code Duello2010-04-26T17:10:45Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|400px|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9692Code Duello2010-04-26T17:09:00Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Duel.jpg|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9691Code Duello2010-04-26T17:08:34Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello */</p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
[[File:Erinnern.jpg|left|]]<br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Duel.jpg&diff=9688File:Duel.jpg2010-04-26T17:06:50Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9687Code Duello2010-04-26T17:05:45Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:3438300.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:3438300.jpg&diff=9686File:3438300.jpg2010-04-26T17:05:10Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9684Code Duello2010-04-26T17:04:32Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
[[File:Erinnern.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9683Code Duello2010-04-26T17:03:32Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
[[Category:Dossier]]<br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9681Code Duello2010-04-26T17:02:51Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div><div style="text-align:center;">Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Oh That was right lad, that was brave:</div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">Yours was not an ill for mending, </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">'Twas best to take it to the grave. </div><br />
<div style="text-align:center;">-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)</div><br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9676Code Duello2010-04-26T17:01:03Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div>Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?<br />
Oh That was right lad, that was brave:<br />
Yours was not an ill for mending, <br />
'Twas best to take it to the grave. <br />
-A.E. Housmand, A Shorpshire Lad, XLIII (1896)<br />
<br />
"Duel of chivalry" defined by Baldwick as "a meeting in single combat between two knights, always with great public ceremonial, to settle a difference of law, possession or honour." (Baldwick, 22)<br />
<br />
From the courthouse to the battlefield man has violently clashed together in any number of ways, including the oddity of the duel, "a judicial combat between two persons or trail by wager of battle" (OED). Necessarily, the duel is ordered by a pre-arrange set of rules manifest in the Code Duello of the time. Although the particulars of which have fluctuated in formality and prominence in relation to the ever changing socio-political atmosphere throughout history, the Code Duello in its various incarnations consistently reflects a tense marriage between the encoded order of systemic rules and the inherent disorder of the violent encounter.<br />
<br />
==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
Dueling arrises out of aristocratic traditions of chivalry and honor, which, although they may not persist as such in modern times, serve to shape the nature of the duel throughout it's practice. Knightly chivalry and honor are closely tied to the monarchical authority, in such circumstance the Code Duello is embedded in the knightly order of the state itself, producing duels as an extension of the throne. With the decline of monarchical authority the duel's authentication shifts from the throne to the standardized code itself, a body often in conflict and competition with both church and state. As a codified system of ethics itself, the existence of Code Duello challenges other sources of authority designated to impose order onto violence. The French concept of the point d'honneur illustrates this tension as existing between the authority of the self and the authority of the king or the state inherent in the act of the duel, "The sense of honour of the aristocracy retained a residue of habitual freedom and self-determination, to which they lent expression by engaging in duelling. At the same time, they introduced their concepts of aristocratic honour into the new areas of competence and functions with which they had been entrusted during the course of their incorporation into the state. Loyalty to the absolute monarch and opposition to this jurisdictional monopoly were two sides of the same coin" (Fervert, 15) This duality of authority, inherent in the point d'honneur, in which the Code Duello finds its roots, is remediated throughout the evolution of the code until it's demise in the 19th century. Embedded in a tradition of supposed civility hides unbridled hostility, out from under strict adherence to codified ritual leeks disorder and subversion. Through the early modern era forms of Codes Duello were specific to kingdom and country but in 1977 the Irish Code Duello became the more or less universally recognized code for dueling throughout the western world. <br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
The mediatic nature of the duel lies not in its particular coded incarnations but in how it addresses a larger issue of encoding the human encounter, most especially the violent encounter with the other. The nature of the duel presupposes a persisting state of conflict, and indeed, Goethe see's the point d'honneur as "a certain safeguard against brutal acts of violence" in as much as, "if dueling did not exist, conflicts would take place under far more violent and disorganized conditions, which would exercise a much more detrimental effect upon the cultural tenor of a society." (Fervent, 23). Viewing the duel in this way reveals the Code Duello as a method of imposing rules and order upon the deeper realm of violence and disorder lurking beneath all encounters. Its existence suggests that if left without the Code Duello to reign the conflict in, tethering it to ordered ritual, disordered violence would simply run amuck. The Code Duello precedes the subject, walking ahead and providing a code of action, a protocol for the inevitable encounter of conflict with the other. Evaluating the Code Duello through the technique of 'mediatic encouter' reveals the degree of encoding in place to mediate an encounter with the unknown. The duel is certainly a highly encoded mediatic encounter, enabled through the body of the Code Duello, which by codifying and ritualizing each step of the duel, provides the subject with protocol for confronting the other through violence, while transforming that violence into a mediation of justice and a restoration of honor, transforming the other into friend, or at the very least lowering the risk of fatalities. <br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
The very need for a highly standardized Code Duello suggests a persisting condition of conflict in the nature of human interaction, a conflict which, although not always violent, can be seen as rooted in the constant tension between the known-self and unknown-other. In the same way that the duel imposes rules of order on a disordered interaction between self and other, all interactions hold a degree of threat, inherent in the unknown, and a degree of order in the coded protocols of interaction, be it dancing or buying a sofa. The other is inherently mysterious to us, his or her inner workings and rational are black boxed from the subjective experience of self, in that mystery lies disorder and the threat of violence. Hegel illustrates the threat found in the encounter with the other, "Just as each stakes his own life, so each must must seek the other's death. . .its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other', it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. . .it must regard its otherness as pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation. (Hegel, 113-114) Hegel's perspective of the threat of the self-as-other illuminates the natural inclination to view the other as threatening and the subsequent need to order the interaction, whether through duel or conversation the other is always being confronted as a mystery, as separate. <br />
<br />
Eva Horn's exploration of boundaries in terms of the Wall can be applied to the subjective human experience, "The space behind the Wall is a black box whose signals and symptoms are to be decoded" (76). Unable to cross the wall into the experience of others, we can only 'decode' them through mediated interaction. Confrontation with the unknown other does not, however, need to remain colored by threat and suspicion. In his work concerning international political theory, Carl Schmitt explores the fundamental importance of determining friend from enemy, a distinction which is formative to the self. Revealing the political nature of encounters with the other, in one's potential to classify the other as friend or foe, Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction reveals itself as being constantly negotiated, the duel exhibiting an extreme form of violent negotiation but one that is not all together different from the workings of a discussion. The confrontation of the other through Code Duello also acts to classify the other, because one can only duel someone of the same social status, the opponent is at once an enemy and a potential friend. The act of accepting a duel is in itself an act of respecting the opponent, deeming him worthy of undertaking a mutual risk. By exposing onesself at once to the symbolic order of the Code Duello and to the violent reality swords and guns, the enemy can be transformed into a friend by passing through the medium of the duel. "The proximity of death subjects both deullists to a sort of ritual purgation during which all feelings of hate, deliberate abuse and enmity are cast aside" (Fervert, 24).<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
"The gate to the law refers to a law that resides behind it. Behind the first gate there is a further fate and then another one. . . nothing but a chain of references" (Vismann, 21). The Code Duello is certainly a form of law, functioning to set the conditions of operation for the mediation of honor, to assign meaning to symbolic actions which will refer to a higher order of justice. Since the duel is fought in response to an offense, the gestures comprising the duel, as set forth by the Code Duello, are symolically referring to a constructed ethics of justice. Whether the assailants sword fight to the death or fire pistols purposely off mark, the duel acts to restore honor symbolically, either through blood or in many cases "merely the willingness to risk ones life" (Fervert, 19).<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
The Code Duello can be seen as the governing principles over a network of agents, the code that creates limits for the activities of the duelists, who are connected through a cybernetic network; each acting as 'function' black box agents themselves but also subject to the universal rules of Code Duello. The space for particular agency is only within the black box of the agent, powered by Deluezian "furor" (Horn, 63) but simultaneously constrained by the ethics of the duel. Honor is transfered throughout the network, dependent upon the opinion of others for legitimation the network of duelists forms a complex ecology of encoded information, each "node" or duelist active on his own. The violent and disordered 'furor' is only accessible through the interface of the Code Duello, that is, through the ordered gestures of the duel which at times betray their disordered core beneath but never succumb to it entirely. The duelists are driven by an inner disorder, the raison d'être of the duel itself, but expressed through an ordered interface of coded actions, reflecting varying degrees of proximity to violent core, ranging from a passionate sword duel, to a mechanical and sanitized pistol duel. <br />
<br />
The encoding of honor entails imposing an ordered system of gesture on top of the disordered state of the violent psyche, at once restricting and promoting violence, creating approved bursts of disorder throughout the ordered system of Code Duello. Irrational acts of violence are encoded into rational acts of justice, calling into question the proclaimed civility of the duel. By this method of encoding, a Faustian bargain is struck, the universalizing and standardizing the terms of conflict, therefore sacrifices the autonomy of the duelist. The paradox is that, the very violent impulse that the Code Duello seeks to squash through ritual is the motor of the entire process, without violent malice there would be no duel, without danger there would be no transformation from dishonor to honor, from foe to friend.<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
The gestural manifestations of the Code Duello illustrate the tension between order and disorder, civility and chaos. The pistol duel especially demonstrates these paradoxes, setting a scene in which the gestures performed become seriously detached from their roots in battle. The mutually pointed guns tied together the duelists in their embrace of the threat of the other, but also pointing to each other as equals, gesturing toward a potential friend. The field between them acts as a stage on which the code will be played out. Aside from the fact that pistol dueling is ludicrously inaccurate, rarely coming even close to one's mark, practices such as "Deloping" or throwing one's shot to miss the opponent on purpose (Fleming, 8) served to further distort the connection between ernest violence and coded tradition. "The deloper had to let the other man fire at him first, giving no hind of what he was planning to do. Often the duelists seconds would declare that honor had been satisfied and ban another shot" (Fleming, 8). This gesture empties the duel of the risk valued as transformational and encoded with justice, leaving only the coded gesture, referring to nothing. <br />
<br />
It is understandable that early duels, fought hand to hand with swords, demonstrating skill and strength, could encode an ethics of power, along Nietzschean lines perhaps. However, with the further standardization of the Code Duello, decreased risk and skill required, the encoding of honor into the gesture of the duel buries deeper and deeper the violent disorder at its base. The farther removed the gesture becomes from the violent core, the more secret the law seems" (Vismann, 21). By the late 19th Century the duel itself becomes a black box, the gesture as merely a line of referential codes, back and back, to what it was ever referring becomes indistinguishable. "Bloodless scholars and fat businessmen waving pistols were would-be warriors, and the confrontation between frail flabby flesh and death was ludicrously inappropriate. . .By the late nineteenth century, disciplined cooperation had replaced heroism in the duel. It was more proper than glorious, more dutiful than beautiful" (McAleer, 53). In a historical devolution, the duel with pistols had reemerged as its medieval antecedent, the ordeal, a trial mediated by mystical chance rather than any distinguishable form of ethics. The modern pistol duel had functionally become a skeuomorph of the earlier dueling which referenced to an encoding of honor rather than empty gesture, the encoded honor that had once been transfered through the medium of the duel was becomes decoded as the 'furor' ceases to inhabit the gesture of the duel. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
Baldick, Robert. The Duel; a History of Duelling. London, New York: Spring, 1970. Print<br />
<br />
"Duel." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>.<br />
<br />
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York, NY: Basic, 2002. Print.<br />
<br />
Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: a Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.<br />
<br />
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Spirit: (the Phenomenology of Mind). [Lawrence, Kan.]: Digireads.com, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Horn, Eva. "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence." Boston: MIT Press Journal Grey Room, 2003<br />
<br />
McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: the Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.<br />
<br />
Schmitt, Carl, and Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Print<br />
<br />
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.<br />
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[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9674Code Duello2010-04-26T16:57:58Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
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<div><br />
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==Point d'Honneur - Dual Authority of Self + State==<br />
<br />
==The Mediatic Encounter - Encoding the Self + the Other==<br />
<br />
==The Threat of the Other - Always Already Confronting Each Other==<br />
<br />
==Encoding Order onto Disorder - Civility Through Violence==<br />
<br />
===A Cybernetic Network of Justice===<br />
<br />
===Motor of Fury - The Irrational Core of the Duelist Black Box===<br />
<br />
===Empty Gesture - The Gutting of the Code Duello===<br />
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[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Code_Duello&diff=9307Code Duello2010-04-26T06:15:08Z<p>Rooney.meg: Created page with 'math? Category:Dossier Category:Spring 2010'</p>
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<div>math?<br />
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[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8712Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:37:35Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Reception of Violence: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror */</p>
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<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 />
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== 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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Grand.jpg&diff=8711File:Grand.jpg2010-04-12T17:36:37Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8708Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:35:03Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Stageness */</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 />
<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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8706Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:34:27Z<p>Rooney.meg: </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 />
<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 />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<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 />
<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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg&diff=8705File:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg2010-04-12T17:32:14Z<p>Rooney.meg: uploaded a new version of "File:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg"</p>
<hr />
<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8704Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:30:51Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Stageness */</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 />
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 />
<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 />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]]<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: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8702Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:30:12Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Stageness and the Horror Machine */</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 />
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 />
<br />
<br />
[[GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg|thumb|right|]]<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: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg&diff=8700File:GrandGuignol-Couverture.jpg2010-04-12T17:28:22Z<p>Rooney.meg: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8688Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:21:13Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Reception of Violence: Visceral Output and the Eroticization 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 />
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 />
<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: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8681Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:14:59Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Suspension of Disbelief */</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: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<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, and 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 in the flesh of the machine as subjects both consume and produce arousal as 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, were 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. <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 />
[[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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8680Grand Guignol2010-04-12T17:14:04Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* The Reception of Violence */</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: Visceral Output and the Eroticization of Horror ==<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, and 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 in the flesh of the machine as subjects both consume and produce arousal as 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, were 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. <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 />
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>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8602Grand Guignol2010-04-12T15:34:06Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 />
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 stadling 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 theater, 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 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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 observtion, 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" (112), illustrated through the structure of seating. 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 />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8600Grand Guignol2010-04-12T15:32:32Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Come Closer, I Won't Hurt You: The Active and Passive Positioning of the Audience-Body */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 />
===Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?.<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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 observtion, 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" (112), illustrated through the structure of seating. 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 />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8598Grand Guignol2010-04-12T15:32:10Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Arrangement of the Audience */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 />
===Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?.<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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 />
COME CLOSER, I WON'T HURT YOU - WHAT TO CALL THIS?<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 observtion, 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" (112), illustrated through the structure of seating. 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 />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8560Grand Guignol2010-04-12T13:19:03Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Don't Cut My Doppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 />
===Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?.<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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8559Grand Guignol2010-04-12T13:18:26Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Techniques of Violent Illusion */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 Doppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?. <br />
<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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8558Grand Guignol2010-04-12T13:18:04Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 Doppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?. <br />
<br />
<br />
=== Techniques of Violent Illusion ===<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 />
Even before entering a theater-du-nord the audiance 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 />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8557Grand Guignol2010-04-12T10:06:11Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Violation of the Staged Body */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 Doppelganger: Fluctuating Divisions of the Audience/Actor Self===<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 stadling 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 theater, 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 become public that spectacular violence is no longer viewed as imaginative or impossible that Grand Guignol breaks down, no longer able to entertain. QUOTE HERE?. <br />
<br />
<br />
=== Techniques of Violent Illusion ===<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
=== Heightened Expectations and Sensationalism ===<br />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8556Grand Guignol2010-04-12T10:03:18Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Violation of the Staged Body */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
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 "shot with a rifle, scapled, strangled, disembowled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools, cut into 83 pieces by an invisible spanish dager, stung, poisoned, devoured by a puma, lashed, infected and decomposed" (MOST MURDERED WOMAN CITATION). 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 />
<br />
=== Techniques of Violent Illusion ===<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
=== Heightened Expectations and Sensationalism ===<br />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8545Grand Guignol2010-04-12T07:37:42Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Apparatus of Horror */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 (TOO GROSS?) 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 mimick human flesh, man and animal unite as a mechanical cog in the horror-machine. This cyborgian conflation is extended through the scientific disection of the staged body. Opened bodies leak past the confines of the stage, splayed and surgically dissasembled, 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 />
=== Techniques of Violent Illusion ===<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
=== Heightened Expectations and Sensationalism ===<br />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Grand_Guignol&diff=8544Grand Guignol2010-04-12T07:36:55Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Stageness */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Stageness and the Horror Machine ==<br />
=== Stageness ===<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 performancatory 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" FIRST NAME Hand and Wilson argue that "the audience is irrefutably implicated in the creative process and an equal partner in the audience-performer dyamic" (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 />
== Violation of the Staged Body ==<br />
=== Techniques of Violent Illusion ===<br />
<br />
== Producing the Horrifiable Subject: How to Be Scared ==<br />
=== Heightened Expectations and Sensationalism ===<br />
=== Arrangement of the Audience ===<br />
<br />
== The Reception of Violence ==<br />
<br />
=== Suspension of Disbelief ===<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gg002.jpg|thumb|right|Le Jardin Des Supplices]] <br />
[[Image:gg003.jpg|thumb|right|Les Crucifies]] <br />
[[Image:gg004.jpg|thumb|right|Sur La Dalle]]<br />
[[Image:gg005.jpg|thumb|right|Bourreau D'Enfants]] <br />
[[Image:gg006.jpg|thumb|right|From Le Baiser De Sang (The Kiss of Blood) Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, 1937]] <br />
[[Image:gg007.jpg|thumb|right|Louis Perdoux and Remy Clary in Le Viol (The Rape) 1959]] <br />
[[Image:ggcap1.jpg|thumb|right|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1GeuxVV4E&feature=player_embedded Click here to watch the video]]] <br />
[[Image:gg001.jpg|thumb|right|Les Nuits D'un Damne]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]] <br />
[[Category:Spring 2010]]</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Heliograph&diff=7704Heliograph2010-03-29T17:53:48Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Works Cited */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[image:Helioknob.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==The Sun-Writer==<br />
<br />
The Heliograph, or sun-writer, is a form of visual telegraph which transmits coded signals by reflecting sunlight from a mirror, in the form of a series of flashes. This flash is created by a “keying” or tilting of a small mirror with a centered translucent viewing lens, mounted upon a tripod and directed toward the receiving location by aligning the viewing lens with the sighting vane. Though the technology dates back to the Native Americans in a primitive form (“As Told by Heliograph”, 213), the most prolific form of the Heliograph was a model invented by Henry C. Mance of the British Army in 1876 for field operation, distinct for it's portability, rifle scope sighting vein and regularized tilting mirror (Journal of the Society of the Arts, 163). The Heliograph can be seen as a remediation of the physical transfer of information over space, such a telegram, into an optical mode of transfer. Developed to increase the range and speed of communication, the advances achieved by the complex and precarious Heliographic system are in fact accompanied by profound limitations.<br />
<br />
[[image:BRITISH_MARK_V_MANCE.jpg|thumb|left|Mark V. Mance Heliograph]]<br />
<br />
==Heliographic Warfare==<br />
<br />
Primarily used as a technology of warfare, the design of the Heliograph can be seen as closely addressing the demands of battle, but also, embedded in those very solutions, new logistical complications arise. A letter from British troops in Afghanistan (1880) conveys military appreciation for its speed and durability , “The value of the Heliograph in war operations is becoming more apparent every day ; the message could not have been delivered so speedily by electric telegraph. The Heliograph does not require the route to be kept open. The line of communication can not be cut. “ (Science: A Weekly Record of Scientific Progress, 22).<br />
<br />
[[image:3360859.jpg|thumb|right|]] <br />
<br />
Literally traveling at the 'speed of light' the Heliographic message cuts through the air protected both by coded encryption and it's immateriality. The rifle scope sighting vein parallels the precision of a firearm, affording the operator heightened control over the spatial destination of the information projected. The light weight and small size of the Heliograph affords a mobility advantageous during warfare, an immaterial replacement, and remediation, of information over wires. However, in these same physical components formed to address and solve problems lies new problems for the transfer of information, especially unsuited to warfare. The portability of the apparatus creates the problem of initial contact, requiring an additional mode of communication to direct the attention of the receiver, instructing him where and when to look. Although the 'bullet' of information travels speedily through the air, unobstructed by the enemy troops below, a problematic dependency on ideal topography and weather conditions arrises. Although not cut by enemy hands, the line of communication can indeed be severed.<br />
<br />
==Light In-Formation: Writing with Light, Flashes as Text/Image==<br />
<br />
[[Image:Eye_72.jpg|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
The Heliographic transfer of information can arguably be understood as a type of writing, information translated into code and inscribed onto the retina of the observer. Replacing the true materiality of the written word, the light is a stylus of inscription, creating a visual experience which conveys the semiotic message behind the flash, on the level of seeing the flash as code as well as translation from code to message. The “double inscription” of 'light-writing' reveals the dual nature of Heliographic messages,“inscriptions insistently belie their own double character, both material and semiotic” (Gitelman, 10)The light embodies the physical form of the code as Iris and the code carries with it the message as Hermes carries a letter.<br />
<br />
==Gone in a Flash: The Ephemerality of the Heliographic Message==<br />
<br />
The Heliographic flash, produced by manipulating sunlight reflecting off a small mirror creates an ephemeral visual experience. While Morse Code was a prevalent encryption system, rendering it an obvious choice, the visual pattern of short flashes seems to have been arbitrary, and in fact some advocated for the change to a constant beam interrupted by short instances of darkness instead, based on the increased visibility of the steady flash this is more logical but rarely adopted but do the necessity of standardization (Meyer, 251). Unlike physical writing, once the flash occurs it almost as quickly disappears, archived only in the observer. Sharing the vulnerabilities of misinterpretation occurring in written text, the same ephemeral quality of 'the flash as disappearing text' that protects it from enemy hands also creates conditions of unreliability and un-verifiability, a mistaken reading lurking in a momentary blink or sneeze of the observer. Conversely, Purkyně's exploration of 'after images' bring into question the potential visual durability of the flash image as well as the objective nature of the senses. “The reception of an [optical] impression is no longer the decisive factor but, instead, imagination and memory “become active themselves in the sense organs. . .senses then become 'mediators'” (Crary, 200).<br />
<br />
==Heliographic Contortions: Limitation and Distortion==<br />
<br />
[[Image:Morse1.jpg|thumb|right|]]<br />
In the analysis of the Heliograph as a medium for the transfer of information, the question of distortion is an important critical perspective. Most obviously the intended distortion lies in the codified message, though morse code is not secret, it is nevertheless a distortion through translation, limiting the message to alphanumerical representation. In contrast to the claims of precision and ease, Heliographic transfer affords various possibilities for distortion and confusion. The imperfect replication of the sun's light when reflected off the mirror, is then distorted into a flash, the intensity and direction of which is dependent upon a fallible operator who is vulnerable to human error and visual fatigue. Furthermore, in the reception of the signal, the observer creates limits based on visual ability, even a perfectly projected flash could be confused by inattention and distorted by observational eye as a lens through which information is refracted. <br />
<br />
The distortional risks inherent in the perceptual experience relate to the Heliographic image in terms of the objective/subjective divide. The first view, typical of the 18th century and earlier allows the Heliographic message to stand as the objective, distorted by conditions of transmission and reception but still accessible through the lens of reason. Distortion, here, is a possibility rather than a necessity, “It was crucial that the distorting power of a medium, whether a lens, air, or liquid be neutralized, and this could be done if the properties of that medium were mastered intellectually and thus rendered effectively transparent though the exercise of reason” (Crary, 64). <br />
<br />
Conversely, the 19th century shift to a visuality privileging the subjective human-mechanism, as demonstrated in Schopenhauer's classification of “perception as a biological capacity that is not uniform in all men or women” (Crary, 84), reveals the transfer of information within the Heliographic system as necessarily distorted. Observing information as being passed from one subjective human being to another, both as operationally “defective physiological apparatuses” (Crary, 92), raises the questions: Is the Heliographic machine more or less distorting than the physiological human-machine? How different are they really?<br />
<br />
==Surveying the Heliographic Multi-demential System==<br />
[[Image:836135_7276_625x1000.jpg|thumb|left|]]<br />
Although the Heliographic apparatus appears as a tool separate from and controlled by the operator, an exploration of the multi-dimensional system involved in the Heliographic transfer of information reveals a more complex web of relations, causation and control. <br />
<br />
Johannes Müller's identification of the body as a “multifarious factory-like enterprise” (Crary. 88) signifies the breakdown of the organic/inorganic distinction between man and machine. Crary led us to ask “how is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?” (2). The body in operation of the Heliograph can indeed be seen as engaged in this convergence, wherein the body is demanded, by the apparatus, to perform regulated mechanized movement. The US War Department Manuel (1910) stresses the need for “perfect adjustment” achieved by “constant attendance” of the operator as well as the importance of the cultivation of “mechanical movement of the mirror”(Visual Signaling, 378). In Foucauldian terms,“the soldier has become something that can be made; an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; making [the body] pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit” (Foucault, 135). This mechanization of the body complicates classification of automation, in a sense the body is striving toward becoming automatic itself, although in actuality, the automatic nature of the Heliograph is isolated to the stabilizing and reflecting automation of the physical structure. <br />
<br />
The body can be seen not only as subject to the apparatus itself but also to the larger system of Heliographic transfer in terms of spatial location. The establishment of two or more Heliographic stations in communication with each other, acts to create a spatial grid, literally charting territory and imposing meaning upon the spatiotemporal bodies present. Not only does the Heliograph project its message, it also relays it's spatial relation within the system. Communication occurs in the context of the spatiotemporal coordinates, implicitly commenting on relational locality of the systemic components, that is, the operational and observational bodies in relation to each other, the sun, topography and the apparatuses. The Heliotrope, a device very similar to the Heliograph, is use for land surveillance (Meyers, 256) demonstrating the close connection between heliotropic communication and the mechanized position of the body in time and space. In the remediation of the Heliographic communication into electric telegraghy, the communicative function was passed on but the locational function began to fade, an erasure culminating in the digital age of email and the virtual collapse of the spatiality of communication.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
“As Told by Heliograph”, The Land of Sunshine, a Magazine of California and the Southwest, Los Angeles, October, 1896: 213. Print. <br />
<br />
Crary, Jonathan. ''Techniques of the Oberver: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.'' Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. Print.<br />
<br />
Foucault, Michel. ''Discipline and Punish.'' New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print. <br />
<br />
Gitelman, Lisa. ''Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.'' Stanford, California: Standford University Press, 1999. Print.<br />
<br />
“Journal of the Society for the Arts.” Volume XXIII. November 20, 1871 – November 12, 1875: London, York-Street. <br />
<br />
Meyer, Albert J. ''Manuel of Signals for the Use of Signal Officers in the Field for Military School, Etc.'' Washington: Government Printing Office 1879. Print. <br />
<br />
“Science: A Weekly Record of Scientific Progress.” Volume 1. New York. July to December, 1880: Print.</div>Rooney.meghttp://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Heliograph&diff=7703Heliograph2010-03-29T17:45:19Z<p>Rooney.meg: /* Gone in a Flash: The Ephemerality of the Heliographic Message */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[image:Helioknob.jpg|right|]]<br />
<br />
==The Sun-Writer==<br />
<br />
The Heliograph, or sun-writer, is a form of visual telegraph which transmits coded signals by reflecting sunlight from a mirror, in the form of a series of flashes. This flash is created by a “keying” or tilting of a small mirror with a centered translucent viewing lens, mounted upon a tripod and directed toward the receiving location by aligning the viewing lens with the sighting vane. Though the technology dates back to the Native Americans in a primitive form (“As Told by Heliograph”, 213), the most prolific form of the Heliograph was a model invented by Henry C. Mance of the British Army in 1876 for field operation, distinct for it's portability, rifle scope sighting vein and regularized tilting mirror (Journal of the Society of the Arts, 163). The Heliograph can be seen as a remediation of the physical transfer of information over space, such a telegram, into an optical mode of transfer. Developed to increase the range and speed of communication, the advances achieved by the complex and precarious Heliographic system are in fact accompanied by profound limitations.<br />
<br />
[[image:BRITISH_MARK_V_MANCE.jpg|thumb|left|Mark V. Mance Heliograph]]<br />
<br />
==Heliographic Warfare==<br />
<br />
Primarily used as a technology of warfare, the design of the Heliograph can be seen as closely addressing the demands of battle, but also, embedded in those very solutions, new logistical complications arise. A letter from British troops in Afghanistan (1880) conveys military appreciation for its speed and durability , “The value of the Heliograph in war operations is becoming more apparent every day ; the message could not have been delivered so speedily by electric telegraph. The Heliograph does not require the route to be kept open. The line of communication can not be cut. “ (Science: A Weekly Record of Scientific Progress, 22).<br />
<br />
[[image:3360859.jpg|thumb|right|]] <br />
<br />
Literally traveling at the 'speed of light' the Heliographic message cuts through the air protected both by coded encryption and it's immateriality. The rifle scope sighting vein parallels the precision of a firearm, affording the operator heightened control over the spatial destination of the information projected. The light weight and small size of the Heliograph affords a mobility advantageous during warfare, an immaterial replacement, and remediation, of information over wires. However, in these same physical components formed to address and solve problems lies new problems for the transfer of information, especially unsuited to warfare. The portability of the apparatus creates the problem of initial contact, requiring an additional mode of communication to direct the attention of the receiver, instructing him where and when to look. Although the 'bullet' of information travels speedily through the air, unobstructed by the enemy troops below, a problematic dependency on ideal topography and weather conditions arrises. Although not cut by enemy hands, the line of communication can indeed be severed.<br />
<br />
==Light In-Formation: Writing with Light, Flashes as Text/Image==<br />
<br />
[[Image:Eye_72.jpg|thumb|left|]]<br />
<br />
The Heliographic transfer of information can arguably be understood as a type of writing, information translated into code and inscribed onto the retina of the observer. Replacing the true materiality of the written word, the light is a stylus of inscription, creating a visual experience which conveys the semiotic message behind the flash, on the level of seeing the flash as code as well as translation from code to message. The “double inscription” of 'light-writing' reveals the dual nature of Heliographic messages,“inscriptions insistently belie their own double character, both material and semiotic” (Gitelman, 10)The light embodies the physical form of the code as Iris and the code carries with it the message as Hermes carries a letter.<br />
<br />
==Gone in a Flash: The Ephemerality of the Heliographic Message==<br />
<br />
The Heliographic flash, produced by manipulating sunlight reflecting off a small mirror creates an ephemeral visual experience. While Morse Code was a prevalent encryption system, rendering it an obvious choice, the visual pattern of short flashes seems to have been arbitrary, and in fact some advocated for the change to a constant beam interrupted by short instances of darkness instead, based on the increased visibility of the steady flash this is more logical but rarely adopted but do the necessity of standardization (Meyer, 251). Unlike physical writing, once the flash occurs it almost as quickly disappears, archived only in the observer. Sharing the vulnerabilities of misinterpretation occurring in written text, the same ephemeral quality of 'the flash as disappearing text' that protects it from enemy hands also creates conditions of unreliability and un-verifiability, a mistaken reading lurking in a momentary blink or sneeze of the observer. Conversely, Purkyně's exploration of 'after images' bring into question the potential visual durability of the flash image as well as the objective nature of the senses. “The reception of an [optical] impression is no longer the decisive factor but, instead, imagination and memory “become active themselves in the sense organs. . .senses then become 'mediators'” (Crary, 200).<br />
<br />
==Heliographic Contortions: Limitation and Distortion==<br />
<br />
[[Image:Morse1.jpg|thumb|right|]]<br />
In the analysis of the Heliograph as a medium for the transfer of information, the question of distortion is an important critical perspective. Most obviously the intended distortion lies in the codified message, though morse code is not secret, it is nevertheless a distortion through translation, limiting the message to alphanumerical representation. In contrast to the claims of precision and ease, Heliographic transfer affords various possibilities for distortion and confusion. The imperfect replication of the sun's light when reflected off the mirror, is then distorted into a flash, the intensity and direction of which is dependent upon a fallible operator who is vulnerable to human error and visual fatigue. Furthermore, in the reception of the signal, the observer creates limits based on visual ability, even a perfectly projected flash could be confused by inattention and distorted by observational eye as a lens through which information is refracted. <br />
<br />
The distortional risks inherent in the perceptual experience relate to the Heliographic image in terms of the objective/subjective divide. The first view, typical of the 18th century and earlier allows the Heliographic message to stand as the objective, distorted by conditions of transmission and reception but still accessible through the lens of reason. Distortion, here, is a possibility rather than a necessity, “It was crucial that the distorting power of a medium, whether a lens, air, or liquid be neutralized, and this could be done if the properties of that medium were mastered intellectually and thus rendered effectively transparent though the exercise of reason” (Crary, 64). <br />
<br />
Conversely, the 19th century shift to a visuality privileging the subjective human-mechanism, as demonstrated in Schopenhauer's classification of “perception as a biological capacity that is not uniform in all men or women” (Crary, 84), reveals the transfer of information within the Heliographic system as necessarily distorted. Observing information as being passed from one subjective human being to another, both as operationally “defective physiological apparatuses” (Crary, 92), raises the questions: Is the Heliographic machine more or less distorting than the physiological human-machine? How different are they really?<br />
<br />
==Surveying the Heliographic Multi-demential System==<br />
[[Image:836135_7276_625x1000.jpg|thumb|left|]]<br />
Although the Heliographic apparatus appears as a tool separate from and controlled by the operator, an exploration of the multi-dimensional system involved in the Heliographic transfer of information reveals a more complex web of relations, causation and control. <br />
<br />
Johannes Müller's identification of the body as a “multifarious factory-like enterprise” (Crary. 88) signifies the breakdown of the organic/inorganic distinction between man and machine. Crary led us to ask “how is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?” (2). The body in operation of the Heliograph can indeed be seen as engaged in this convergence, wherein the body is demanded, by the apparatus, to perform regulated mechanized movement. The US War Department Manuel (1910) stresses the need for “perfect adjustment” achieved by “constant attendance” of the operator as well as the importance of the cultivation of “mechanical movement of the mirror”(Visual Signaling, 378). In Foucauldian terms,“the soldier has become something that can be made; an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; making [the body] pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit” (Foucault, 135). This mechanization of the body complicates classification of automation, in a sense the body is striving toward becoming automatic itself, although in actuality, the automatic nature of the Heliograph is isolated to the stabilizing and reflecting automation of the physical structure. <br />
<br />
The body can be seen not only as subject to the apparatus itself but also to the larger system of Heliographic transfer in terms of spatial location. The establishment of two or more Heliographic stations in communication with each other, acts to create a spatial grid, literally charting territory and imposing meaning upon the spatiotemporal bodies present. Not only does the Heliograph project its message, it also relays it's spatial relation within the system. Communication occurs in the context of the spatiotemporal coordinates, implicitly commenting on relational locality of the systemic components, that is, the operational and observational bodies in relation to each other, the sun, topography and the apparatuses. The Heliotrope, a device very similar to the Heliograph, is use for land surveillance (Meyers, 256) demonstrating the close connection between heliotropic communication and the mechanized position of the body in time and space. In the remediation of the Heliographic communication into electric telegraghy, the communicative function was passed on but the locational function began to fade, an erasure culminating in the digital age of email and the virtual collapse of the spatiality of communication.<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
“As Told by Heliograph”, The Land of Sunshine, a Magazine of California and the Southwest, Los Angeles, October, 1896: 213. Print. <br />
<br />
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Oberver: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. Print.<br />
<br />
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print. <br />
<br />
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford, California: Standford University Press, 1999. Print.<br />
<br />
“Journal of the Society for the Arts.” Volume XXIII. November 20, 1871 – November 12, 1875: London, York-Street. <br />
<br />
Meyer, Albert J. “Manuel of Signals for the Use of Signal Officers in the Field for Military School, Etc.” Washington: Government Printing Office 1879. Print. <br />
<br />
“Science: A Weekly Record of Scientific Progress.” Volume 1. New York. July to December, 1880: Print.</div>Rooney.meg