User:Kim/reading/The Laurence Rassel Show

by Laurence Rassel and Terre Thaemlitz
on Terre's website
Excerpt Mix

annotated pdf Laurence Rassel Show Transcript Kim

2

Laurence Rassel operates anonymously as "critical rejection of systems of authorship" which "are inseparable from the troubles of patriarchy"

Between the death of her invisibility, a feminist assassination of the patriarchal Author figure ... .

3

A special message from Joan Smith (FROM “MORALITIES: SEX, MONEY AND POWER IN THE 21ST CENTURY”)
18th century as age of privatization of land an bodies. process of enclosure --> primarily womens bodies (controlling birth without birth control)

4

Nicholas

So basically yes, this is a kind of legal fiction.

Laurence

Imagine we have pure, cleared, original, new material ... .

Free licenses are not bad per se, but just not the solution to licensing problem (which they are bringing on) because they attune to the same principles.

Terre

Okay, I believe this constitutes a legal verbal contract, so we'll stop recording right now.

5

A special message from Peggy Phelan (FROM UNMARKED: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE)

Visibility is a trap; it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession.

4 implicit presumptions:

1. Identities are visible (visually marked)
2. relation between representation and identity is linear and smooth
3. not represented == not addressed
4. increased visibility == increased power

Each presumption reflects the ideology of the visible -- erases power of unmarked, unspoken and unseen

....The focus on skin as the visible marker of race is itself a form of feminizing those races which are not white. Reading the body as the sign of identity is the way men regulate the bodies of women.

6

Terre

authorship relates to a kind of patriarchal authoring of our bodies

How to bring the notion of the body into this program?

We want to counter this notion of fetishizing the recognized or “authored” body.

7

A special message from Michele Foucault (FROM “WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?”)
Author does not precede the work but is more of a functional principle, by which free circulation, manipulation, composition ... is prevented.
With shifts in culture, author function will disappear -- lets fiction + polysemic texts function in other modes again.

8

Laurence

I always dreamt to be a feminist nobody, to be anybody, what a subversive act, what an act of resistance

10

Terre on Transgendered authorship
How a name functions for transgendered people legally in claiming ones identity.
Transgenderism as not only a crisis of the body, more a crisis of social relations.

11

A special message from Roland Barthes (FROM “LA MORT DE LʼAUTEUR”) Roland Barthes

text is ... a multidemnsional space.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

words are only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely

Laurence Rassel

funny that, when we claim to be an author - finally - well, he died.

simultanous when feminists started 'claiming/ reclaiming' authorship - author was marked as death (1968/ 69)
Terre remarks: or did barthes/ focault emphasize suicide of the author to make space for other authors?