An optimistic view that a site exists where \u2018Otherness\u2019 has no power to divide or hurt or even that there is a choice in how one is treated by others, seems to ignore the reality of Power itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a process at work in the production of culturally constructed categories of identity. The body is subjected to a number of disciplinary practices and institutions, such as, the family and education, which leads to \u2018self-regulation\u2019, in order to fit smoothly and docilely into the social realm. It is based on Foucault\u2019s idea of an all-seeing watchtower, which sets up an internal scrutinising eye on all thoughts and behaviour, forbidding transgression with the threat of being cast as an outsider and rejected as \u2018different\u2019. This fear dominates and controls and the production of a subjective self, the experience of being an object in the world, with the choice to submit to normative discourse or not, has to contend with this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pattern in the hierarchy of power relations is universal in that even in a first world country, there is an increasingly impoverished permanent underclass separated from the rich elite. The vertical pyramid structure is therefore mirrored in every modern capitalist society where equality and compassion are valued less and less. The hierarchies of gender and race cannot be seen in isolation from class and other systems of categorization based on wealth and status. All such socially and historically constructed oppositions which take on the absolute unquestionable authority of natural fact must be exposed and challenged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
LS8<\/h4>\n\n\n\nAcrylic collage on paper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
This is about the inequality at either end of a particular main road in Leeds. At one end of Roundhay Road the terraced houses cost about \u00a350,000 and at the other end mansions are worth more than \u00a3500,000. The images of local landmarks show the difference in the standard of living, despite having the same postcode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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How Will Capitalism End?<\/h4>\n\n\n\nAcrylic and collage on board<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Based on the book by Wolfgang Streek (2016). It claims that capitalism has overreached itself by turning money, labour and nature into commodities. It also depicts various economic theorists and their ideas, which have shaped our socio-economic history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Glass Bead Game<\/h4>\n\n\n\nAcrylic on canvas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Based on the book by Hermann Hesse, this work explores the danger of academic research and ideas that ignore the lived experience of the uneducated, working class. It extols the simple pleasures of the body in relation to the cold, removed mental world of symbolism and the intellect. Mathematics, algebra, letters can not explain the historical events of life and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The imposition of hierarchies in European cultures has become the fundamental basis of ordering and meaning in all discursive activities.\u00a0 It is a cultural process whereby the human body, social order, spatial location, and even psychological processes are ranked according to a constructed vertical symbolic hierarchy of high and low.\u00a0 This distinction, however, is not symmetrical because the higher discourses are associated with the most powerful socio-economic group and they have the cultural power and authority to designate what is high and low in society.\u00a0 They recount a recurrent pattern:\u00a0 The \u2018top\u2019 rejects the \u2018bottom\u2019 for reasons of prestige and status but finds that there is an interdependence, in that they can only be at the top if there is another at the bottom. But they also discover <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c\u2026that the top includes<\/em> that low symbolically, as a primary eroticised constituent of its own fantasy life.\u201d Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression<\/em>, p.5<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
We must abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy and linearity and replace them by ideas of nodes, links and networks. (Deleuze) Curves, bends, association and amalgamation are the real stuff of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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