unfixedness

It was the mystery of these men's alertness that caught our eyes and held us there, their ability to withstand cold temperatures, but also the overlap between pleasure and religious belief, the overwhelming pang of longing to see two worlds at once, our young and future self, the fascinating definiteness of the men's half-naked bodies and the unfixedness of our recent sensibilities.

An authoritative offering, to be sure (supplemented by a lavish catalogue), and one that is perhaps big and rich enough to make the ultimate historical claim for the unfixedness that, paradoxically, defines his practice.

Abbey also hyped a book he titled, "The Sexual System and its Derangements'': "It tells about Manhood, Womanhood, Sex, Beauty, Marriage, Nervous and Sexual Debility, languor, tiresome feelings, unsociability, bashfulness, cowardice, irritable temper, forgetfulness, gloomy forebodings, unfitness for business, inability to reason or concentrate the mind or meet the gaze of others, unfixedness of purpose, trembling, staggering, pasty skin, hollow eyes, blunted sense, scanty beard, and a thousand symptoms which usher in Palsy, Idiocy, Insanity and all kinds of diseases.''

The unfixedness of liminality allows Marvell to blend physical states: "unfathomable grass" (370) changes from solid to liquid as men become diving mariners, sounding the depth of the meadow (377-84), then Israelites parting the "green sea" (390), then cruel soldiers massacring the grass and the rail living there (393-400).

Far removed from the limelight, forming no identifiable group, these poets developed highly individual practices shot through with a shared and far-reaching awareness of poetry's inherent unfixedness and precariousness, its drifts and deferrals, its passingness and its porousness, its incessant opening upon absence and otherness.

Indeed, the most significant trait of Gainsborough's art may be its perceptual unfixedness that could register effectively the instability of the social world of his time, one that recognised the central importance of individual subjectivity in a `public' increasingly defined as an aggregation of private individuals rather than an elite of patricians.

Literary representations of the lowly shoemaker making new holidays would have likely reminded readers and theater audiences of the very unfixedness of contemporary calendrical practice, a mutability persisting despite various attempts to "fix" an official calendar of annual remembrance.

Risk can be read as the result of fragmentation/contraction and processes of decentering/recentering within hypermodernity, of the myriad inclusions and exclusions that make up the unfixedness of hypermodernity.

Where male subjectivity is marked by unity, fixedness, and autonomy, female subjectivity is marked by what Belsey calls a "discursive discontinuity"; they are unfixed, asymmetrical, slippery (and, therefore, suspect, needing to be policed), their very unfixedness underwriting the sense of automonous fixity on the part of the male subject, whose stable position is obtained through and in contrast to their unstable positions.(8) In Wroth, this very unfixity allows her to imagine an identification with another other, which would allow her the public freedom of expression denied her by her censorious society.