[...]s series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*

[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)

stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them

(Foucault's notion of) power = effective immobilization of the social body

(the idea of) woman immobilized (turned to stone) by the power of the gaze

*medusa* had the power to turn to stone all who came within her purview (...is she the one who can turn stone back to person?)
to petrify, a producer of figures

Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)

medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:

Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive

(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life

(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)

Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)

[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope

artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator


...................................

Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)

apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگردان

Kruger & Calderwood --Archer--> searing critique of gender identity and the ways that gendered stereotypes capture the body within a tight weave of politics and ideology

[*]medusa effect: a critical gesture located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)

Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits

find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”

[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes

flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’

(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]

*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance

(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)


•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance

stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*

***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)

[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freed[...]