Graduate Student, English
About
My research explores the role of corporeality in imagination, taking the case study of modern postural yoga. I propose that modern yogic discourse may manifest Deleuzian concepts of experience and the body. As a yoga student exhales into a pose such as Downward-Facing Dog [Adho Mukha Svanasana] - pressing into the thumb and first finger and rolling the shoulder blades into the back of the spine - the feel of that specific 'dog' may be entirely different to any other day, or to any other dog performed that day. The sign 'Downdog', whether word, image or performance of the pose, recognises the uniqueness of this copy of previous action. Downdog's position with a sequence, like its name within a sentence, can either call attention to itself or to the other poses and words that surround it, depending on the context of its repetition and the individual's response. In this sense the individual becomes responsible for the nature of their own experience, as repetition occurs not through 'representation and action (reproduction of the Same) but in the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other).' [25] As Deleuze claims, this process generates space, by espousing 'the principle of repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other – involves difference'. [26]
By cultivating this space of difference I argue that yoga has the potential to affect 'the mind outside of all representation... of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.' [1] Yoga is performative in the sense that it comes into being through being practiced, and is continually redefined by the practice of those who embody it. As my research develops I am considering whether students of yoga are able to use the imaginative body as a site for deconstructing boundaries, limitations and identities that have been imposed upon their corporeality.
I graduated from the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor Arts/Bachelor Art Theory Honours 1 and am a co-editor of the postgraduate journal Philament. I am also training as a Vinyasa yoga teacher.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton, Continuum Books, London, 1994.
