atc@ucb: Vivian Sobchack, Monday 7:30pm

atc@ucb:

A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality
Vivian Sobchack, University of California, Los Angeles

* The Spring 2004 ATC Series is dedicated the memory of Billy Kluver *

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 15 March, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.

"Ten years ago, as the result of a recurrent cancer, my left leg
(quite literally by then 'a drag') was amputated high above the knee.
Six months or so after this operation, I was ready for my first
prosthetic leg and began to learn to walk again. Thus, for me, there
is a certain scandal in the recent rush by cultural theorists to
embrace 'the prosthetic' as metaphor – and not because I find such
metaphorical usage offensive in some facile sense that privileges
"authentic" over 'discursive' experience. Rather, the prosthetic as
metaphor is scandalous because it is too often less imaginatively
expansive than it is reductive and less complex and productive in use
than is the prosthetic in its mundane context. Perhaps, however, the
prosthetic metaphor is most scandalous because it far too quickly
mobilizes attention to (and fascination with) artificial and
'post-human' body parts in the service of a discourse always located
elsewhere-displacing the prosthetic rather than living it first on its
own quite extraordinary premises. As a consequence, 'the prosthetic'
has become a fetishized but 'unfleshed out' catchword – a vague and
'floating signifier' – for contemporary critical discourse on
technoculture.

"Since I am, shall we say, particularly 'well equipped' to do so, my
talk will both critique and redress this metaphorical displacement of
the prosthetic through what might be called a 'phenomenological
tropology' – that is, a thick description of the prosthetic both as it
is imaginatively (and rhetorically) 'figured' through representation
and as it is imaginatively lived and 'figured' as a material condition
of existence. First, I focus on debates around the use and misuse of
the prosthetic as metaphor with particular attention to distinctions
of relation expressed in the tropological figures of metaphor,
metonymy, and synecdoche. Then, I turn (autobiographically) to a more
materialist, but no less figural, description of the prosthetic as a
technological object and a lived experience. Finally, I address the
figural and material practice and polymorphous play of Aimee Mullins-a
double amputee model, athlete, and actress, whose many prosthetic legs
dance both figurally and materially to a complex choreography that
oversteps the bounds of the current 'prosthetic imagination.'"

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Vivian Sobchack is Professor of Critical Studies in the Departmentof
Film, Television and Digital Media and Associate Dean of the School
of Theater, Film and Televison at the University of California, Los
Angeles. She was the first woman elected president of the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies and now sits on the Board of Directors of
the American Film Institute. Her work focuses on film and media
studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on the phenomenology
of technologically-mediated perception and the philosophy of
language. Her essays have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, Artforum International, camera obscura, Film Quarterly,
Representations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Body & Society, and
History and Theory, and she has edited two anthologies: The
Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event and
Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change.
Her own books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction
Film, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, and
the shortly forthcoming Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image
Culture.

Linda Williams, Prof. of Rhetoric and Film Studies, will introduce.

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The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum to present online video of ATC talks, available both in
QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and the full 2003-2004
series schedule, please see:

http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
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