10.20 2022

I have no experience in writing research paper, and the 2nd draft I submitted did not meet the requirements, and the spelling was not proofread. Janet reminded me of these problems and introduced me some ways to proofread the spelling and grammar . But then I was quarantined because of covid-19, and the hotel signal was shielded, so I was only able to do basic proofreading, I think there are still a lot of problems. At the same time I may have misunderstood the requirements of Harvard format. I went on to revise some in the assessment research paper link.

In terms of the content of the paper, I think the arrangement and logic of the content could have been better. The relationship between Shamanic culture and the pursuit of disease in the last paragraph is probably the main focus of the paper, and could be written in more detail.

I was negative but have a close contact to positive patient, so I was centrally quarantined. I was quarantined in the mobile field hospital for 5 days and then moved to the hotel next to it at my own expense for 200 yuan per day because I couldn’t stand the environment in the hospital. 

There was no way to go home to get my clothes, I got a common cold halfway through (I thought I was covid positive for a while because of the orderly confusion), there was no way to get medication (no medication for covid positive patients either), and the doctor just advised us to drink more water. No one told me when I could go home, and I finally got an official response and was able to go home after an almost argumentative debate.

My friend’s door was equipped with a magnet entrance guard (installed on the door，alarms when opens the door, equivalent to surveillance) and was restricted from leaving the house, and finally remove it by insisted on calling the police for 2 days.

The magnet entrance guard is not currently supported by any legal documents, and some centralized quarantine is unjustified, but is still enforced. China’s epidemic prevention policy includes the phrase “you are responsible for your own health”, but in reality your legal rights are in the hands of others, and you only have the “rights” to be responsible for accidents happens on you.

5.27 2022

I had a lot of ideas but wasn’t sure how they would turn into a research paper, and I didn’t sort out the connections between them.

In the tutorial, Jonathan helped me narrow it down to two artists, Josef Beuys and Henry Darger. He also gave some examples of papers and guided me to figure out the general structure of the paper.

I had seen Henry Darger’s work in high school and was struck by his non-exam-based approach to painting. （Admission to art schools in China requires studying a uniform style for the exam.) When I saw Josef Beuys’ exhibition at the museum afterwards, I was amazed at his use of elements, metaphors, and perceptions. These two artists have had a great influence on my expression of “ideal work”, but so far my work has been limited by logic and my skills. I hope that in the process of writing my research paper, I can further support my ideas through theoretical research. At the same time, I hope to learn new techniques to break out of the current dilemma.

Also talked about unit1 assessment

How to arrange the picture elements more delicately and light the picture. I used flash to create the hard light of the office for the current photos, but I was actually looking forward to the flat, soft, “monotone” lighting of advertising photography. I will continue to learn about lighting afterwards. Currently adding some equipment.

I chose bunny as a metapher to childhood but lack of location arrangement. And bunny’s appearance didn’t quite match the feeling I wanted to express. I did try to make the doll myself, but just didn’t feel like doing it well enough. Now that I think about it, I actually just want to make a doll that combines a variety of materials for a soft sculpture, and then photography is something that comes after it is made. My energy should be spent on the bunny first.

• organised conversation note with Professor Tie from Department of Philosophy, School of Politics and Public Administration, Qufu Normal University

Richard Kearney points out that our bodies understand and interpret the world through our senses. Since Plato’s distinction between sense and reason, the mainstream view of traditional philosophy has honored reason and devalued sense, and sensation has become something inferior. However, unlike the traditional mainstream view, carnal hermeneutics incorporates the senses into the scope of hermeneutics and emphasizes the important role of the senses in understanding and explaining the world. In carnal hermeneutics, the senses of smell, taste and touch are closer to the body and are the most typical embodiment of corporeal sensations. Although these three senses are primordial senses, they are not primary, inferior, or crude senses, but primary senses. These primordial senses are the deepest understanding and interpretation. Before there was language, we were already understanding and expressing, and our senses had already become sensual, and we were already using them to understand and interpret the world.

The most fundamental basis for Richard Kearney’s proposal of carnal hermeneutics is that the body has interpretive properties, i.e., the body can also be understood and interpreted. He argues that the incarnation is the birthplace of understanding and interpretation. We, as human beings, are living beings, and as living beings, we are, first of all, incarnate beings. Without the existence of the incarnation, our thoughts, our actions, everything is impossible to talk about. And the vitality lies in the touch and taste of the body, and we understand and interpret the world in the touch and taste of the body. Therefore, hermeneutics begins with the incarnation, and existence is hermeneutic through and through.

To sum up, Richard Kearney’s carnal hermeneutics has opened up a new direction for the development of contemporary hermeneutics. By re-examining the deep and complex relationship between sensation and interpretation, carnal hermeneutics refers to hermeneutic “perception”, which is directly extended from the traditional meaning of “deciphering mysterious information” to the most original incarnational form of identification and recognition. It can be said that carnal hermeneutics does not abandon the traditional hermeneutics, but complements and enriches its connotation with the practical analyzing of hearing, touching and smelling.

In the ideology of the Chinese education system, the government is a kind of “big patriarchal” government, where the people are expected to follow a unified command and obey these sweeping rules, believing that the collective good comes before the individual good. But when accidents occur, the disaster is often attributed to all “private” woes.

Because of the “big patriarchal”, the individual doesn’t acctually get the chance to take responsibility for one’s own decision. But the power side always uses an “educational” tone, as if it were the people who caused the disaster by not being “self-responsible”, so that the structure can maintain its purity, once again invisible and free of responsibility.

 “Diversity is not disease; the anomalous is not the pathological.”(Georges Canguilhem, 2007, 96)

There are often statements on Chinese SNS like “health is the basis of beauty” and the existence of so-called health standards (including height, weight, psychology), but I think this is too arrogant. The standard of health is fluid. Modern medicine’s delineation of the standard of disease is based on an average standard value. In The normal and the pathological, Georges Canguilhem uses the example of amputation to illustrate the importance of this definition. A person who has lost an arm can hardly be said to be healthy from the point of view of other people, because he differs greatly from them in physical characteristics. However, from the point of view of the living organism itself, although at the beginning the amputated subject is unable to adapt to his surroundings, after a period of adaptation he is able to form an adaptive relationship with his environment, and in this sense the amputated individual is still abnormal, but never pathological.

However, the inconvenience of being “unhealthy/abnormal” cannot be denied.

Another Angle

As Michel Foucault mentioned in Madness and Civilization, it is not because we first focused on diseases of the brain and nervous system that we invented the concept of madness; rather, we first established the concept of madness as opposed to reason, constructing madness as an event opposed to reason, and then looking for physiological evidence of madness, i.e., damage to the nervous system and the brain. This approach, precisely, is contrary to the history of modern scientific development.  Thus, we can understand that the modern invention of insanity was not motivated by purely medical and physiological purposes, but from the very beginning by political and social purposes, i.e., the exclusion of an impossible scope of governance, which was defined as insanity. 

Insanity became an ungovernable subject, as distinguished from those modern subjects who are sane and fit to govern, and ultimately, for these ungovernable subjects, the specific approach was to establish mental hospitals (sanatoriums), thus isolating them so that their presence would not jeopardize the functioning and governance of normal society.

Unlike Canguilhem, Foucault, from the beginning, thinks of pathology on a social and political level, rather than on the level of individual health. Whereas Canguilhem’s pathology is thought of in terms of the relationship between individual lives and their surroundings, Foucault thinks of normality and pathology not in terms of the normality and pathology of the individual organism, but in terms of the normality and pathology of society as a whole and in terms of its structure.

TATE’s definition of outsider art is: outsider art is “Outsider art is used to describe art that has a naïve quality, often produced by people who have not trained as artists or worked within the conventional structures of art production.”

Outsider artists create art for themselves, document their life experiences, and record historical events. Many outsider artists create art because they believe they have received a message from God or some other spiritual or intellectual source. These artists have a strong inner vision and feel compelled to create their art. Often, this art is driven by impulse, obsession or religious inspiration.

The term “outsider art” actually refers to the result of a process. The process of making it, then, is the way to create outsider art.

Henry Darger is a famous outsider artist, but can Joseph Beuys be called an outsider artist?

Although Joseph Beuys entered Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1947. And through his artist training he gradually developed his own relatively complete philosophy and artistic system in terms of style and thought. Putting himself within his works of art, Beuys enhanced the anthropological power of art as a whole. He wrapped himself in stories of Tatar tribes (true or false for now) to create a fascination with impulse, obsession, religion, and inspiration. The presence of this “motivation” makes me define him as an outsider artist in my paper.