Notes for an article on Barbara
Sternberg's film A Trilogy by Maureen Paxton
SYNOPSIS: YES, NO AND MAYBE or WHY, WHY NOT AND WHO
CARES?
-the differences, functional and
dysfunctional, between subjective and objective 'recording' and 'remembering;'
differences between historicizing and mythicizing
as being gender-specific to, respectively, men and women.
-history
as male as system; myth as female as body.
-societal pressures for the male to
leave the 'body' and be inducted into, to learn to use and manipulate
system(s); to not only leave the body but to attempt denial of it insofar as it
is liable to death and decay.
-woman as
body, hence renunciation of her and her exclusion from invalidation and
annihilation by systematized 'enterprises' (e.g., intellectual disciplines that
would include historiography).
-the
denotative and connotative gulf between eternity and immortality; the eternal
as feminine and the immortal as masculine; the social and anti-social, physical
and metaphysical ramifications of this.
-conventional
use of language as system; language as technology; as the determinant of how
something is to be studied and its 'findings' to be imparted or transmitted.
-language
as a masculine extrapolation on the body (all living organisms but especially
the human female body).
-body as
nature and its submission to Newtonian/Cartesian definition and manipulation;
consequential destruction.
-I-Thou; subject-object; the disassociativeness
of systematized thinking; the struggle for a reciprocal empathetic autonomy
between parent and child and especially the mother (as body, as Nature) and
child.
-the absent father as representing
language, science, history (The Discontents of Civilization), etc.;
systematized enterprises intended, in the broadest sense, to penetrate and
articulate the mystery of one's own origins and nature; frustration of that
abstraction/knowledge/power insofar as the (Western) epistemological
methodology doesn't allow for or permit empathetic participation.