Today was the first constellation of my second year at university. I received the topic ‘Representing the (Dis)ordered body by Jennifer Whitney.
After a quick run-through of what to expect over the next 5 weeks and a reminder about the expectations of the essay we started out by drawing a self-portrait. But this was a bit different from a normal self-portrait as we had to draw ourselves from our point of view, looking down at ourselves and what we see from our own eyes. I could see the tip of my nose which looked very blurry and my legs which appeared a lot smaller than my arms because of the viewpoint. I was confused as why we were doing this at first and wondered how this related to the topic, but it was quite an interesting task as I had never thought to draw from that viewpoint before.
It soon made sense when we started to learn about fragmentation and how we view ourselves:
“The Mirror Stage” is a complex and detailed article by Jacques Lacan, in which he identifies something called the “ideal-I”. Lacan explains that when we are younger and developing who we are, from our own viewpoint we see our parents, carers and everyone around us as whole. Whereas we are incomplete; identifying ourselves in fragments (our legs, our arms). We see this ‘ideal’ as only outside of ourselves, people who are complete. From a young age we begin to process early fragmentation and learning about yourself. It seems that our ‘self’ is always out of reach and we’ll aim to achieve that cohesive self. We become alienated from ourselves because everyone around us is complete. Because of this we are probably affecting how we perceive ourselves and how we will never feel like we are whole and even though we may feel these thoughts cross our minds or that it even affects us, we have no idea what’s going on in our unconscious mind.
Humanism is the philosophical idea that defines what makes us human and it’s more than just biological. This self-centered theory is that humans are at the center of the world and universe and that everything revolves around us. Although we all live our lives in a different way and go through completely unique experiences, it’s those experiences that link us together. Common themes like anger, love and fear are what makes us human. “Each of us lives our human-ness as a uniquely individual experience; but that experience, we are asked to feel, is part of a larger, all embracing humanity, a “human condition”’. – Tony Davies, Humanism (1997)
‘The Age of Reason’ arose in the 1700s. it was the belief that humans were in control of nature, the understanding of equations needed to put together a house and other rational scientific approaches.
“I think, therefore I am.” The meaning behind this well-known quote by Rene Descartes is that we cannot doubt that we exist as we are the ones doing the thinking and to be able to think in the first place then we must exist. But this idea relies upon an ideal, in this old-fashioned belief you were expected to have these attributes:
- Male
- White
- Straight
- Able bodied
These were seen to make you top of the hierarchy of ‘the self’ but obviously most people couldn’t live up to these traits therefore, the people that didn’t fit into this small minority were viewed as less human. And because women were considered more emotional, they were supposedly less rational and therefore, less human. It is good to challenge the status of humanism as it is such a dated belief and there are several issues with it.
“(W)e lead our lives as stories, and our identity is constructed both by stories we tell ourselves and others by the master narratives that consciously or unconsciously serve as a model for ours.” – Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘The Story of “I”: Illness and Narrative Identity’ (2002)
We live our lives in stories to try and make sense of the things that happen; like if someone asks you what you got up to last night you will tell it like a story and maybe leave a few things out that may not fit in with the persona you’re trying to give, you may want to give people a certain impression of who you are. The rising pressure of social media and trying to act happy all the time- it’s very to easy to fake it in a quick snapshot of your life and it could just be a set up image to make your life appear better than it is. People like to make out that they’re happier than they are, but it makes more sense to post about the good things because it feels safer that way. We create a social media identity to create an ideal and we also consume the stories of other people’s ideals. It can become very extreme like social media influencers for example, they wear designer clothes, stay in amazing hotels, have a beautiful partner and a cute dog, leading a seemingly perfect life.
Reflection: I think we did the self portrait because it verifies Lacan’s point about only viewing a fragmented self and we will never see our full selves. This reveals that we will never truly experience ourselves like we experience others. This shows that everyone is the exact same because we are all at the center of our own world and that everyone is linked because they all view in the same way, from their own viewpoint and we are not able to view your whole self but can view everyone else around you. Another reason you may feel like your body is foreign to you is because of a disease or disability.
MEGAN PRESTON 