Drawing from my archival research on the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the urban guerrilla movement active in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland from the 1970s, my dissertation works through the RAF to speculate about the compulsion towards self-representation inherent to subjectivity. Such compulsion proffers an urgent and recurrent imperative to speak what cannot be said or to conjure what does not exist. This work argues that the perils and the failures of such enunciation, in the face of its compulsory demand, are felt not only in speech but in choreographies of subjectivity performed in aesthetic convolutions of space, gesture, and intonation. These convolutions are subject-forming material productions, rather than reflections or echoes of a pre-existing coherent subject, and trouble the notion of self-representation to the extent that they produce and re-produce the self.
While the body is formed by culture, it consistently circumvents the limits of the genres that govern speech communication, therefore, my work is concerned with tracing a mise en scne of self-production by emphasizing non-textual elements. The forms that this circumvention can take exceed the involuntary cry, gesture, uneven breath, or facial expression to include uses of space space that is implicated in the bodys formation but the public legibility of such circumventions is not guaranteed. This work aims to refunction the RAF's declaration of the body as a weapon to the body as a medium for communication and to approach the aesthetics of a body (anti)language that extends beyond the particularities of the urban guerrilla project to the situation of mundane subjectivity that repeatedly calls for enunciation.
My dissertation is a performative text that deploys formal interventions such as collage, assemblage, photography, and interleaved texts meant to intrude upon the reader that target instrumental language use. To illustrate that the ongoing production of subjectivity of the urban guerrilla is not alien to that of the politically recognizable citizen, my work contemplates practices of contemporary art and the production of material objects of signification that engage in practices of citation and disguise the incoherence of our acts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/728 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Mair, Kimberly Marie |
| Contributors | Sayer, Derek (Sociology), Barbour, Charles (Sociology), Mos, Leo (Psychology), Sweeney, Dennis (History and Classics), Andersen, Christian (Native Studies), Ramp, William (Sociology, University of Lethbridge), Clough, Patricia Ticineto (Sociology, City University of New York) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 3883205 bytes, application/pdf |
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