Can’t wait to feel better: Facebook Live and the recalibration of downtime in tending to the body

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110034
Author(s):  
Dang Nguyen

This article explores the temporality of liveness on Facebook Live through the analytical lens of downtime. Downtime is conceptualized here as multiscale: downtime exists in between the micro action and inaction of everyday life, but also in larger episodes of personal and health crises that reorient the body toward technologies for instantaneous replenishment of meaning and activity. Living through downtime with mobile technology enables the experience of oscillation between liveness as simultaneity and liveness as instantaneity. By juxtaposing time-as-algorithmic against time-as-lived through the livestreaming practices of diện chẩn, an emergent unregulated therapeutic method, I show how different enactments of liveness on Facebook Live recalibrate downtime so that the body can reconfigure its being-in-time. The temporal reverberation of downtime and liveness creates an alternative temporal space wherein social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society can retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the central of the everyday.

Author(s):  
Åsa Trulsson

Contemporary spiritualties are often portrayed as a turn to a subjective and individualized form of religion, consisting of individually held truth claims or private peak experiences that are generated sporadically at retreats and workshops. The portrayal is ultimately related to a perception of everyday life in contemporary Euro-America as mundane, rationalized, and secular, but also the exclusion of practices centered on the body, the home and the everyday from what is deemed properly religious. This article explores the sacred technologies of the everyday among women in England who identify as Goddess worshippers. The purpose is to further the understanding of religion and the everyday, as well as the conceptualization of contemporary Goddess-worship as lived religion. Through examining narratives on the intersection between religion and everyday activities, the technologies of imbuing everyday life with a sacred dimension become visible. The sacred technologies imply skills that enable both imagining and relating to the sacred. The women consciously and diligently work to cultivate skills that would allow them to sense and make sense of the sacred, in other words, to foster a sense of withness through the means of a host of practices. I argue that the women actively endeavor to establish an everyday world that is experienced as inherently different from the secular and religious fields in their surroundings; hence it is not from disenchantment or an endeavor with no social consequences. The women’s everyday is indeed infused with different strategies where the body, different practices, and material objects are central in cultivating a specific religious disposition that ultimately will change the way the women engage with and orient themselves in the world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
McKenzie Wark

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-104
Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz

Somesthetics, somapower, and microphysics of emancipationThe aim of the article is to analyze the resistance to the oppressive power in the everyday life with the stress on bodily practices which become the vehicle of emancipation. The article explores two important, but never adequately researched, theoretical fields: the body as a vehicle of social critique and the relation between everydayness and politics. I would like to address these two issues by discussing the debates on them unfolding in the contemporary social sciences and humanities. This will enable me to identify the existing gaps and suggest how they could be bridged. The main argument of the article is that we need an adequate concept of the relations between the body and power, which can emerge from the pragmatist tradition, developed and improved in this respect by Richard Shusterman’s neo-pragmatism.


Conatus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Θάνος Κιοσόγλου (Thanos Kiosoglou)

In his seminal Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault aims at outlining the historical course that led to the promulgation and consolidation of the institution of imprisonment as a means of punishment as well as narrating how the corresponding human type, i.e. the contemporary disciplined subject, has been shaped. Obviously, the disciplined subject gradually took the place of the tormented subject. Consequently, this study aims at describing the sequential mutations of the imposed punishment as it progressively shifted from the spectacular slaughtering of the body to the strictly scientific manipulation of the non-material dimension of the human being. The reformation of the punitive practices “constructs” a docile body. It must be noticed, however, that this body is not necessarily guilty, since the disciplinary schemes concern everybody, even the most innocent sides of the everyday life as for example the hospital, the school or the barracks. Additionally, discipline is imposed through the division of the space, what Foucault calls the “art of allocation”, so that every working person is easily seen and supervised by the eye of the authority, while the disciplined subject is being forged gradually through the sense of responsibility before the flowing time. Foucault highlights the “political technology of the body”, that is its usurpation by the authorities, who aim at imposing to it adictated activity that produces palpable results in a binding frame of time. Although selective and brief, the present account of the punitive concepts of the three last centuries clarifies the fact that the authoritarian strategies are indissolubly interwoven with the different connotations of the human body, through the use of which they subdue human beings.


Kulturstudier ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Aske Juul Lassen

<span style="font-family: MeliorLTCE; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: MeliorLTCE; font-size: x-small;"><p>The article focuses on the role of insulin in the everyday life of the type 2 diabetic. The diagnosis of type 2 diabetes is not merely the establishment of a chronic disease, it also alters the patient’s conception of his own body and his everyday life. For many patients, the diagnosis is their first encounter with the interiors of their bodies. It is attempted to regulate the diabetes by a number of practices; in the article, this is viewed as a bio-medical disciplinization, which deals with the body and life as objects. The biomedicine conquers the diabetic body and becomes part of the diabetic’s everyday life. Thereby, the body is problematized as a natural and delimited category. The limits of the body are broken down by the recurring penetration of the skin, when the blood sugar is measured or the insulin injected. Insulin is analysed as a trickster figure which exerts a boundary work on the body, plays with its categories and inverts the relations between poison and medicine, freedom and constraint, artificiality and naturalness, security and risk. Everyday life is changed and future put into perspective by the trickster, which at the same time makes both everyday life and the future possible by its blood sugar reducing properties.</p></span></span>


Author(s):  
M. Tarasiuk

In the article some aspects of the everyday life of Volhynia burghers and peasants of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the end of the 14th and mid-16th centuries are considered. The variety and variations of food, the types of clothing available to ordinary people, the concept of body care and health care, as well as the entertainment of the common people and places of rest such as taverns and baths are explored. It was discovered that the Volhynians’ diet was rich and included meat products, such as fish like carp, pike, sturgeon, beluga and even Danzig herring, flour products, seasonings and natural preservatives, which were bought at city auctions and grown on their own. By the middle of the 16th century, Volhynians formed separate ideas about medicine, where approaching Jewish or Welsh doctors were common. Usually, medicines were herbal drinks and ointments Examination of the body was carried out to identify the causes of the disease. Activities of local people were analyzed, such as dice, chess, dance, communication with other residents of Volhynia cities and villages, usage of prostitutes. In fact, depending on the success of the production sphere, the citizen or the peasant could afford a standard of living. It was found out that the everyday life of the Volhynian was relatively bright and filled with events and included the choice of products for dinner, the selection of a new wardrobe item, the discussion of local news after work, participation in lawsuits in ham, playing games and taking the glass of a strong drink. The Volhynians’ ideas of «unprofitable people», which had analogies in Western European countries, were singled out.


Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110633
Author(s):  
Jakob Svensson

This article attends to tensions and negotiations surrounding the introduction and development of a news-ranking algorithm in a Swedish daily. Approaching algorithms as culture, being composed of collective human practices, the study emphasizes socio-institutional dynamics in the everyday life of the algorithm. The focus on tensions and negotiations is justified from an institutional perspective and operationalized through an analytical framework of logics. Empirically the study is based on interviews with 14 different in-house workers at the daily, journalists as well as programmers and market actors. The study shows that logics connected to both journalism and programming co-developed the news-ranking algorithm. Tensions and their negotiations around these logics contributed to its very development. One example is labeling of the algorithm as editor-led, allowing journalists to oversee some of its parameters. Social practices in the newsroom, such as Algorithm-Coffee, was also important for its development. In other words, different actors, tensions between them and how these were negotiated, co-constituted by the algorithm itself.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (11) ◽  
pp. 1699-1717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Hyde ◽  
Diane Burns ◽  
John Hassard ◽  
Anne Killett

Based on fieldwork in residential homes, arrangements for the care of older people are examined with reference, primarily, to Deetz’s theory of ‘corporate colonization’. Extending this theory, it is argued that grouping such people in care homes can result in a form of social segregation, one that reflects the management of the aged body in relation to normative constructions of dependence. Focusing on the experiences of residents, the everyday effects of narratives of decline on disciplining the lives of older people are assessed, with this analysis taking recourse to the work of Foucault (1979). The result is the identification of three related concepts at work in the colonizing process of the aged body: (i) appropriation of the body – the physical and social practices involved in placing older people in care homes; (ii) separation from previous identities – how a range of new subjectivities are produced in the process of becoming a ‘resident’; and (iii) contesting colonized identities – the ways in which residents can attempt to challenge normative concepts of managed physical and mental decline. Overall the disciplining of the body is theorized not only as an adjunct to the notion of corporate colonization but also, more generally, as a prominent and powerful organizing principle of later life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-365
Author(s):  
Jae Won Edward Chung

The collapse of the Japanese empire unleashed in the streets of Seoul new everyday epistemologies and affects closely tied to evolving relationships across media. This article analyzes how reportage, photography, and literature in post-liberation and post-Korean War South Korea synergistically addressed pressing postcolonial and neocolonial questions, the weight of which could be felt in the realm of daily life: What does liberation look like in the marketplace? How should we make sense of the foreign military presence in Seoul after the Korean War? What are the effects of foreign consumer goods on the minds and bodies of the people and the nation's sovereignty? The article shows how South Korean cultural actors responded to the increasing commodification of everyday life by bringing critical attention to the uneasy relationship between the body, foreign commodity-signs, and artifacts of mass visuality. These intermedial accounts succeeded in linking the granular experiences of everyday life to larger historical and geopolitical forces and making visible how the encroachment of mass media products and commodity-signs were transforming the very means by which the everyday could be represented.


Author(s):  
L.F. Abzalov ◽  

Based on a comprehensive study of various written sources and ethnographic materials, this paper considers some aspects of personal hygiene of nomads, who lived in the Eurasian steppes during the 13th–15th centuries, i.e., primarily in the states of Genghis Khan and his descendants. Regarding both similar living conditions and ethnocultural situation, as well as the important role of traditions in the nomadic society of Central Asia, the data of the ethnographic sources about the everyday life of nomads during the subsequent eras (in the 16th–20th centuries) were extrapolated to the nomadic society of Genghis Khan’s states. The body hygiene procedures (associated with face, hands, and head hair) were analyzed. The main personal hygiene products (combs, scissors, mirrors, cosmetics (white paint), soap, etc.) were described. It was revealed that the hygiene culture of nomads in the Eurasian steppes developed under the influence of the following objective factors: nature and climate, economic and living conditions. In this process, the faith-related factors and the worldview were also critical, mostly in Ulus and Jochi. The hygiene knowledge and practices of all nomads were generally similar, but there were some specific features associated with their ethnocultural background.


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