Here it is!
http://docs.google.com/a/utulsa.edu/leaf?id=0BzFvga99dQF8NmNjYmFjN2EtMzU0Mi00YjQ5LWJkZDUtMzA4YTNlNDY0ODIx&hl=en
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Conservation vs. Human Life
Rarely does conservation come down to immediate life and death decisions. We talk about preserving the environment or saving endangered species as a far-off idea, something we should obviously do. It is sometimes slightly inconvenient to remember to bring along our reusable bags to Super Target, and a Prius may have cache on par with a Beemer in some circles, but as yet there is no convertible model. It became obvious during the ecocriticism unit that we are badly missing the point.
What happens when we privilege animal life equally (or above) human life? Here's the article from The New Yorker that I mentioned in class. I think it raises some relevant issues about the consequences of the ideas about privilege we discussed. Article HERE.
What happens when we privilege animal life equally (or above) human life? Here's the article from The New Yorker that I mentioned in class. I think it raises some relevant issues about the consequences of the ideas about privilege we discussed. Article HERE.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Friday's class
Dear class, although I was not able to make it back to Tulsa in time for class, I admire you for sticking around and carrying on without me. I regret missing Amelia's presentation and the ensuing discussion, as I'm sure she and everyone else had much edifying things to say.
I am proud, furthermore, that you all have taken ownership of this course and of your own learning. You have helped each other navigate very difficult material, and class to me has felt from the beginning as if it were a conversation between a group of intellectually curious and open-minded people interested in similar things.
One of my ultimate goals for you coming out of this class is that you have the confidence and skills learn on your own. Friday proves to me that you are ready for that goal, and I expect that each and every one of you will continue to teach yourselves and others for the rest of your lives.
I am proud, furthermore, that you all have taken ownership of this course and of your own learning. You have helped each other navigate very difficult material, and class to me has felt from the beginning as if it were a conversation between a group of intellectually curious and open-minded people interested in similar things.
One of my ultimate goals for you coming out of this class is that you have the confidence and skills learn on your own. Friday proves to me that you are ready for that goal, and I expect that each and every one of you will continue to teach yourselves and others for the rest of your lives.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Queercore
Awhile back, one of my friends showed me this pamphlet published by S.C.A.B, the Society for the Complete Annihilation of Breeders. I'll let you look for yourself:
http://36-c.blogspot.com/2008/12/scab-manifesto-1990.html?zx=21e968a8263c944
Of course, I was initially very shocked, and a little upset, although as that wore off I began to think that they couldn't possibly be serious.
I later came to the conclusion that they were, although not in the way I had first. Something weird happens when subaltern groups say outrageous things. They were serious about saying something, by using their unique position to reveal the bigotry of the radical discourses that we are used to hearing. In an ideal world, any anti-gay literature would seem as bizarre as this. However, I could also see how violence in any discourse is harmful. I'm surprised I've spent so much time trying to figure out one group in a tiny party called queercore, but I suppose that's what they wanted.
http://36-c.blogspot.com/2008/12/scab-manifesto-1990.html?zx=21e968a8263c944
Of course, I was initially very shocked, and a little upset, although as that wore off I began to think that they couldn't possibly be serious.
I later came to the conclusion that they were, although not in the way I had first. Something weird happens when subaltern groups say outrageous things. They were serious about saying something, by using their unique position to reveal the bigotry of the radical discourses that we are used to hearing. In an ideal world, any anti-gay literature would seem as bizarre as this. However, I could also see how violence in any discourse is harmful. I'm surprised I've spent so much time trying to figure out one group in a tiny party called queercore, but I suppose that's what they wanted.
Post Colonialism
Today I had an interesting experience at my tutoring job at McLain High School in North Tulsa. I was assigned to monitor EOI tests with a few other volunteers from the community. McLain is a primarily black school, and its students are most often the lowest performers in the district. Anyway, today I was able to talk with 4 older members of the community, all black, and all who have grown up facing adversity because of the color of their skin. I couldn't help while I was sitting at a table with all of them, feeling a strong sense of guilt over the color of my own skin, and an inherent inability to relate to them. They discussed topics such as the Tulsa race riot, segregation and in turn the ill effects of integration, along with prominent civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. They talked about their inability to find a sense of identity without a real place to call home, much like we discussed in class. I was telling Amelia about this after I got back from the school, and we both agreed that there is this sense of guilt that we as white people have been instilled to feel for our race's injustices against black Americans, even if we ourselves haven't committed anything worth feeling guilty about. I enjoyed listening to them, and they really enlightened me to a lot of things, but I couldn't escape this feeling.
Ecocriticism
My first semester at TU, I took a 1063 class whose contents were all related to Nature. In the class we read many authors that were referenced in The Ecocriticism Reader, including Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Thoreau, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and others. I had no idea at the time, (probably because my professor didn't articulate it) that ecocriticism was a literary theory. I really enjoyed that class because we explored all the ways in which nature affects society and culture. The underlying tone of the class was that every person is obligated (much like Levinas' Other as discussed in Who is my Neighbor?) to take care of their piece of the world as long as they live on it and in some ways abuse its resources. Anyway, I highly recommend these authors to everyone...maybe for a summer reading list?
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
The Need for New Historicism
A couple of weeks ago I was flipping through the Tulsa World when I came across an article with an intriguing title--"Politicians, pundits aim to rewrite history" (I couldn't get any sort of link to this to work, but you can find the article on the newspaper's website if you like). This article depicts some present ways in which politicians of the right are attempting (as the title says) to rewrite history, particularly in ways that would be unflattering to liberalism and thus, presumably, to the current regime (I do not mean to offend any who may be a part of the right, as there are many conservatives who are not fond of what is going on as well. I also don't mean to spark some sort of political debate.). Examples of changes they would like to be made are depicting Jamestown as a failed example of socialism. This ignores the fact that Jamestown was "a capitalist venture funded by the Virginia Company of London."
This seems to me to be one of the problems that New Historicism establishes itself as being counter to--the effect of biases on the writing of history. I do not think that it can be denied that these revisions are intended as means of bolstering the views of the Republican party; as Alan Brinkley (a historian at Columbia University) puts it in the article, "History in the popular world is always a political football. The right is unusually mobilized at the moment."
This seems to me to be one of the problems that New Historicism establishes itself as being counter to--the effect of biases on the writing of history. I do not think that it can be denied that these revisions are intended as means of bolstering the views of the Republican party; as Alan Brinkley (a historian at Columbia University) puts it in the article, "History in the popular world is always a political football. The right is unusually mobilized at the moment."
Why the Closet Will Never Go Away
In the end, I have to agree with Sedgewick; I don't think the closet is escapable. I think that the Netherlands and Iceland, two of the most tolerant countries on the planet, really demonstrates this fact. In both of these countries, many of the problems associated with homosexuality in less tolerant countries (drug use, STDs, mental illness) remain. Granted, they're lessened, but they still exist.
Of course, when you establish the closet as inescapable, the obvious follow up question is: why? And I think there are several reasons.
First of all, even in a country where parents would be as happy with a gay child as with a straight one, the assumption will be that you are heterosexual. The vast majority of people in the world are, unfortunately, heterosexual. And even if you believe the works of Kinsey on the subject, most people are going to end up being mostly heterosexual. It's insescapable.
It goes back to the whole "biological underpinning" that we discussed in the feminism unit. There are biological reasons for homosexuality. There have been all sorts of studies linking male homosexuality with population pressures and surplus males. When you're dealing with something that blurs the line between culture and biology, you run into these sorts of questions.
A second reason I don't think the closet will ever go away, which may seem rather tangetial, is that history is not progressive. We all assume that homosexuality will be more accepted in the future, but this isn't necessarily the case. Classical Greece was less homophobic than Hellenistic Greece which was less homophobic than modern Greece. The Age of Decadence precedes the Victorian Era. The Roaring Twenties was thirty years before the Square Fifties. And so on. History can change in ways that no one would have predicted.
Of course, as Professor Jenkins rightly pointed out, this does preclude the role of activism. It also precludes the role of the individual in dealing with this sort of thing. There are things people can do that can "fight the closet." Coming out the closet is one. Respecting alternative sexualities is another. We might not be able to see a culture where the closet is destroyed, but we can see one where the closet doors are thinner.
Of course, when you establish the closet as inescapable, the obvious follow up question is: why? And I think there are several reasons.
First of all, even in a country where parents would be as happy with a gay child as with a straight one, the assumption will be that you are heterosexual. The vast majority of people in the world are, unfortunately, heterosexual. And even if you believe the works of Kinsey on the subject, most people are going to end up being mostly heterosexual. It's insescapable.
It goes back to the whole "biological underpinning" that we discussed in the feminism unit. There are biological reasons for homosexuality. There have been all sorts of studies linking male homosexuality with population pressures and surplus males. When you're dealing with something that blurs the line between culture and biology, you run into these sorts of questions.
A second reason I don't think the closet will ever go away, which may seem rather tangetial, is that history is not progressive. We all assume that homosexuality will be more accepted in the future, but this isn't necessarily the case. Classical Greece was less homophobic than Hellenistic Greece which was less homophobic than modern Greece. The Age of Decadence precedes the Victorian Era. The Roaring Twenties was thirty years before the Square Fifties. And so on. History can change in ways that no one would have predicted.
Of course, as Professor Jenkins rightly pointed out, this does preclude the role of activism. It also precludes the role of the individual in dealing with this sort of thing. There are things people can do that can "fight the closet." Coming out the closet is one. Respecting alternative sexualities is another. We might not be able to see a culture where the closet is destroyed, but we can see one where the closet doors are thinner.
MC Solaar and PostCo
Hopefully people will find this interesting, as we talked about rap the other day.
MC Solaar was born in Senegal (a French colony) and moved to France when he was very young. I thought of his work as we talked about hip hop and rap spreading over the world. We talked about postcolonial situations within the country of the colonized, not so much when the colonized ends up in the colonizer's country, which is what is happening today in France. Although we don't normally think of France as a country where there are racial tensions, they definitely exist within France today. You might remember the student riots a few years ago in Paris.
Anyway, here is the video. I can't figure out the embedding, so I hope you don't mind a little copy-paste action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n8kGW16RYs&a=2s8YkAZUYWU&playnext_from=ML
It includes imagery of both the old, faded idea of the American West, as well as the exploitation of American cultures to other countries. Does the America act as a colonizer of cultures, even when they don't have a physical presence in other countries? The song also ask questions about the situation of minorities in France, the violence they encounter, ect. Don't worry, the video has subtitles. :)
MC Solaar was born in Senegal (a French colony) and moved to France when he was very young. I thought of his work as we talked about hip hop and rap spreading over the world. We talked about postcolonial situations within the country of the colonized, not so much when the colonized ends up in the colonizer's country, which is what is happening today in France. Although we don't normally think of France as a country where there are racial tensions, they definitely exist within France today. You might remember the student riots a few years ago in Paris.
Anyway, here is the video. I can't figure out the embedding, so I hope you don't mind a little copy-paste action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n8kGW16RYs&a=2s8YkAZUYWU&playnext_from=ML
It includes imagery of both the old, faded idea of the American West, as well as the exploitation of American cultures to other countries. Does the America act as a colonizer of cultures, even when they don't have a physical presence in other countries? The song also ask questions about the situation of minorities in France, the violence they encounter, ect. Don't worry, the video has subtitles. :)
Why I Hate Brokeback Mountain
In Bressler's section on Queer Theory, he mentions Brokeback Mountain and gives a list of various people's opinion on the movie. I figure, since this movie is theoretically supposed to be about people like me and for people like me, that I'd add my opinion.
I hated Brokeback Mountain, and I hated people's reaction to it.
It wasn't just the reaction of people on the Right. Not every movie review that didn't like it was condemming it for bringing down the wrath of God. But there seemed to be a recurring theme in all the reviews I read: it was too graphic.
Too graphic.
Too graphic.
This movie was mild compared to similar R rated movies, quite honestly. The only reason that it got the "graphic" label so consistently was that it was gay. You switch out one of the guys with a girl, I highly doubt that anyone would have complained.
Please forgive me for linking to TVTropes, but:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays
If you really, really wanted to make a statement about gay rights, if you really wanted your movie to defy stereotypes about homosexuality, you'd have the gay couple live happily ever after.
I'm not saying that you can't have literature that ends in tragedy for gay people, but:
1) Pretty much all mainstream culture follows this trope
2) It still plays into the stereotype that gay love ends in tragedy, even when it's trying to portray said relationships positively. It's hard to realize how pervasive and how influential this sort of thing can be.
For example, I write short fiction, and I feature lots of stories with gay male characters. But I've noticed a rather unsettling recurring theme: it always ends in tragedy. And true, maybe I just prefer to write tragic stories. But my straight characters have gotten happy endings. It's an almost subconcious thing: if I'm writing a story with a gay main character, it will not end well.
Maybe Brokeback Mountain wouldn't bother me so much if wasn't touted as so progressive, so subversive. If this had just been an art house flick about gay cowboys eating pudding that no one had heard about, I probably wouldn't even care. But then everyone talks about how great it is, and I wonder if they're seeing the same movie I'm seeing. I wonder if they're seeing a movie where gay men are portrayed as promiscuous adulterers betraying their poor put upon wives. I wonder if they're seeing a movie that is almost overbearingly modest called "graphic." I wonder if they're seeing a movie that's so cloyling unaware of how ignorant it is about gay life.
In a way, it kind of reminds me of Hostel. Now, Brokeback Mountain is superior to Hostel in pretty much every way. But Eli Roth tries to claim that the movie isn't homophobic while ignoring the fact that his main villain fits pretty much every bullet point of the monstrous homosexual: he's a cheater, he's promiscuous, he preys on younger, heterosexual men. Roth can claim that this is critiquing homophobia somehow, but I'm reminded of what someone said about anti-war movies: it's impossible to make an actual anti-war movie, because any movie portraying war inevitably glamorizes it. You can't create this image of a monster whose inhumanity is so closely linked to his homosexuality, and then wink at me and tell me it's "ironic." There are limits to irony, despite what post-modernism tends to say, and we've rather clearly hit the limit.
That's one of the nice things about the death of the author, I suppose. When an author creates a work and says something about it that is clearly untrue, you are allowed to call them on it. Otherwise, Narnia wouldn't be an allegory, Farenheit 451 would be about political correctness, and Hostel would be a feminist film. As long as you can back up what you are saying, you are free to say it, regardless of what the author says otherwise.
So I guess that in the end this blog post wasn't really about Brokeback Mountain. But it related, tangentially, to the topic, and I hope that's good enough.
I hated Brokeback Mountain, and I hated people's reaction to it.
It wasn't just the reaction of people on the Right. Not every movie review that didn't like it was condemming it for bringing down the wrath of God. But there seemed to be a recurring theme in all the reviews I read: it was too graphic.
Too graphic.
Too graphic.
This movie was mild compared to similar R rated movies, quite honestly. The only reason that it got the "graphic" label so consistently was that it was gay. You switch out one of the guys with a girl, I highly doubt that anyone would have complained.
Please forgive me for linking to TVTropes, but:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays
If you really, really wanted to make a statement about gay rights, if you really wanted your movie to defy stereotypes about homosexuality, you'd have the gay couple live happily ever after.
I'm not saying that you can't have literature that ends in tragedy for gay people, but:
1) Pretty much all mainstream culture follows this trope
2) It still plays into the stereotype that gay love ends in tragedy, even when it's trying to portray said relationships positively. It's hard to realize how pervasive and how influential this sort of thing can be.
For example, I write short fiction, and I feature lots of stories with gay male characters. But I've noticed a rather unsettling recurring theme: it always ends in tragedy. And true, maybe I just prefer to write tragic stories. But my straight characters have gotten happy endings. It's an almost subconcious thing: if I'm writing a story with a gay main character, it will not end well.
Maybe Brokeback Mountain wouldn't bother me so much if wasn't touted as so progressive, so subversive. If this had just been an art house flick about gay cowboys eating pudding that no one had heard about, I probably wouldn't even care. But then everyone talks about how great it is, and I wonder if they're seeing the same movie I'm seeing. I wonder if they're seeing a movie where gay men are portrayed as promiscuous adulterers betraying their poor put upon wives. I wonder if they're seeing a movie that is almost overbearingly modest called "graphic." I wonder if they're seeing a movie that's so cloyling unaware of how ignorant it is about gay life.
In a way, it kind of reminds me of Hostel. Now, Brokeback Mountain is superior to Hostel in pretty much every way. But Eli Roth tries to claim that the movie isn't homophobic while ignoring the fact that his main villain fits pretty much every bullet point of the monstrous homosexual: he's a cheater, he's promiscuous, he preys on younger, heterosexual men. Roth can claim that this is critiquing homophobia somehow, but I'm reminded of what someone said about anti-war movies: it's impossible to make an actual anti-war movie, because any movie portraying war inevitably glamorizes it. You can't create this image of a monster whose inhumanity is so closely linked to his homosexuality, and then wink at me and tell me it's "ironic." There are limits to irony, despite what post-modernism tends to say, and we've rather clearly hit the limit.
That's one of the nice things about the death of the author, I suppose. When an author creates a work and says something about it that is clearly untrue, you are allowed to call them on it. Otherwise, Narnia wouldn't be an allegory, Farenheit 451 would be about political correctness, and Hostel would be a feminist film. As long as you can back up what you are saying, you are free to say it, regardless of what the author says otherwise.
So I guess that in the end this blog post wasn't really about Brokeback Mountain. But it related, tangentially, to the topic, and I hope that's good enough.
Monday, April 19, 2010
"In many discussions I heard or participated in immediately after the Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, antihomophobic or gay women and men speculated--more or less empathetically or venomously--about the sexuality of the people most involved with the decision. The question kept coming up, in different tones, of what it could have felt like to be a closeted gay court assistant, or clerk, or justice, who might have had some degree, even a very high one, of instrumentality in concieving or formulating or 'refining' or logistically facilitating this ruling, these ignominious majority opinions, the assaultive sentences in which they were framed" (75).
Not too long ago, they played a documentary at Circle Cinema--Outrage--about this very topic: the problem of closeted homosexuals in positions wherein they have the capability of helping along legislation, court rulings, etc. that are anti-gay. Though I just said this was played not too long ago, it was actually long enough that I don't precisely remember the exact details, but, suffice it to say that this has been a fairly significant and recent issue. Kirby Dick, the director, seeks to present the case of several politicians who are believed to be gay, but who have strongly anti-gay voting records (presumably to deflect attention from their orientation, which, were it to "come out," they believe would be a detriment to their political career). Some of these men (I do not recall any women being included) are married and very succesful (I believe one was seen as some sort of rising-star with the possibility of a very high-level office in his future). The movie, I thought, was very thought-provoking--particularly in the depiction of one man's attempt to forcibly "out" those sorts of politicians. He made it his goal to force them out of the closet. I don't know how I feel about this or, maybe more importantly, how Sedgwick would feel about this manifestation of the closet dynamic. On the one hand, the politicians' (admittedly rumored) in-the-closet-ness is negatively affecting progress for homosexuals, but, on the other hand, it seems pretty vicious to take away someone's closet without their consent.
Not too long ago, they played a documentary at Circle Cinema--Outrage--about this very topic: the problem of closeted homosexuals in positions wherein they have the capability of helping along legislation, court rulings, etc. that are anti-gay. Though I just said this was played not too long ago, it was actually long enough that I don't precisely remember the exact details, but, suffice it to say that this has been a fairly significant and recent issue. Kirby Dick, the director, seeks to present the case of several politicians who are believed to be gay, but who have strongly anti-gay voting records (presumably to deflect attention from their orientation, which, were it to "come out," they believe would be a detriment to their political career). Some of these men (I do not recall any women being included) are married and very succesful (I believe one was seen as some sort of rising-star with the possibility of a very high-level office in his future). The movie, I thought, was very thought-provoking--particularly in the depiction of one man's attempt to forcibly "out" those sorts of politicians. He made it his goal to force them out of the closet. I don't know how I feel about this or, maybe more importantly, how Sedgwick would feel about this manifestation of the closet dynamic. On the one hand, the politicians' (admittedly rumored) in-the-closet-ness is negatively affecting progress for homosexuals, but, on the other hand, it seems pretty vicious to take away someone's closet without their consent.
Queer Theory
Hi everyone! Here's my powerpoint rundown of Queer Theory, which I'll be glad to present in class on Wednesday if there's time. Enjoy!
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B7ad_oxlGKo8MTk0ZjlkN2UtZjAyMi00MjU3LTgxMTQtNDNjMTEzY2NmYTYw&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B7ad_oxlGKo8MTk0ZjlkN2UtZjAyMi00MjU3LTgxMTQtNDNjMTEzY2NmYTYw&hl=en
Friday, April 16, 2010
Postmodern/Cultural Fantasies
Well, embedding didn't work. Trying again:
((Included) (Excluded))
Copyright, credit, and thanks go to Dorothy at Cat and Girl)
((Included) (Excluded))
Copyright, credit, and thanks go to Dorothy at Cat and Girl)
I hope I don't get in trouble for this:
Ok, this is a comedic(?) video that has always fascinated me. It is a song and accompanying video. It is also somewhat (very) offensive.
1) It plays to multiple stereotypes: Black fathers not caring for their children, blacks being generally under-educated, even black people needing to work more on their personal hygiene (which I confess I haven't even heard of before.)
2) It attempts to correct what it perceives as problems, not directly with the way that blacks are perceived in society, but rather with the ways that it perceives these problems to be aggravated by the African-American community (especially the younger members of that community.)
I am interested in both the positive and negative aspects of this video, especially as it might relate to the black community castigating those it deems "too white" or "too conciliatory." I'm not sure how this issue has fared in contemporary African-American studies, but I know that it was at one time a fairly important counter-argument against blacks in the US overcoming status discrepancies by obtaining a better education, speaking English more "correctly," and that sort of thing.
I'm going to link to the video twice. The first will be the clean version. If you are easily offended, I'd watch this one:
However, the clean version has most of the lyrics cut out, to the point where it is actually difficult to understand what is being said roughly 70 percent of the time. If you are less easily offended, or just desperate to hear the song without irritating gaps, then here's the original version:
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Link to African-American ciritcism ppt googledoc
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_qgtV4p-Z94YzFkMGQ2NzMtNDJiYy00NDlhLTg3YTItZmQ0ZGIyNzI3ZDVi&hl=en
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Clarence Page and the Pitfalls of "Color Blindness"
What Elizabeth was saying about the comedian who said that people who claim to not see color are pretty much deluding themselves reminded me of an essay I read for sociology last semester--"Showing My Color" by Clarence Page (he also has a book by the same name). I can only find a small portion of it online (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/showingmycolor.htm), but it at least sort of goes into the issue at the bottom of the excerpt. He says that Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement of his dream that he would one day know a time when people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" has frequently been used to support the idea of "color blindness" (claiming to not see the color of a person's skin)--a use of the phrase that he disagrees with. He counters that "[he doesn't] want Americans to be blind to [his] color as long as color continues to make a profound difference in determining life chances and opportunities. Nor [does he] wish to see so significant a part of [his] identity denied." Also in the essay, he covers a lot of the issues we discussed in relation to African-American Studies. He describes the experience of double-consciousness as being like a "transracial," like "a transsexual who feels trapped in the body of something unfamiliar and inappropriate to his or her inner self." And, on the issue of identity, he says that "there is no one way to be black. We [blacks] are a diverse people amid a nation of diverse people" and that "...a comfortable identity serves to provide not only sense of belonging and protection for the individual against racism, but also, ultimately, a sturdy foundation from which the individual can interact effectively with other people, cultures, and situations beyond the world of blackness."All in all, he makes some good points, I think, and I would reccomend reading the essay (I cannot speak for how the whole book is, as I haven't read it) if you can locate a more complete copy.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Rae Armantrout, Brand-New Pulitzer Prize Winner
(Heard this in class today, thought about Levinas and the Other. Enjoy!)
Intact
1
From what I don’t recall
I am able to infer
what didn’t happen
in a given setting
while you can’t or won’t
so that
I might have been behind you
in the boat
or you might have been alone
or accompanied by strangers.
Alternates persist
since they aren’t named as such.
On the other hand, I feel
the removal of one element
changes the event
so it must disappear
(intact)
2
If thunder clapped,
small flowers
at leaf joints
stared straight ahead
in silence.
Did rocks react?
Try to recall
http://jacketmagazine.com/12/arman.html
Intact
1
From what I don’t recall
I am able to infer
what didn’t happen
in a given setting
while you can’t or won’t
so that
I might have been behind you
in the boat
or you might have been alone
or accompanied by strangers.
Alternates persist
since they aren’t named as such.
On the other hand, I feel
the removal of one element
changes the event
so it must disappear
(intact)
2
If thunder clapped,
small flowers
at leaf joints
stared straight ahead
in silence.
Did rocks react?
Try to recall
http://jacketmagazine.com/12/arman.html
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
This is an interesting essay I stumbled upon today about how "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" challenges stereotypical depictions of black families on TV by placing one in an upper-class atmosphere. There's a pretty great clip on the second page of the essay as well. Check it out!
Response to "Postmodern Blackness" by Bell Hooks
I enjoyed reading this essay because it develops a point of view about empathy that we have been struggling to understand in this unit on cultural studies. How am I as a middle class white student suppose to understand and empathize with cultures vastly different from my own? Hooks offers an answer in the form of postmodernism. She states, "The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance" (Paragraph 8). I found this very interesting and insightful. Sure there is no way we can legitimately place ourselves within the culture, but we can understand through our own human nature the feelings of those in separate cultures through a postmodernist mindset, which allows for all kinds of radical influences to emerge.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Making Breaks in the Post
Does anyone know how to make jumps in the posts on the blog? I feel bad about writing so much and monopolizing the space, but my attempts to insert text breaks are ineffective.
Thanks much.
Thanks much.
Chinua Achebe, Aggravated Postcolonialist
In his essay “An Image of Africa”, Chinua Achebe expressed his ire about the influential role Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness played in shaping and perpetuating negative stereotypes of African people in English-language literature and academia. (There's a quick run-down of how Achebe’s arguments relate to Conrad's book after the jump)
Achebe’s 1975 criticism of an 1899 novel reflects cultural norms and expectations of earlier European and American societies, which may be less valid in the contemporary era of globalization where many Americans and Europeans presume some African citizens to be literate and intelligent, and are more personally familiar with educated African immigrants in their own communities. Although Conrad’s symbolic link between moral purity and European whiteness (and its correlative connection of African ethnic identity with savagery and evil) is less explicit in contemporary European and American cultures, the strength of the white/black, good/evil dichotomy in his novel may subconsciously introduce such racist concepts to new generations of readers without the mitigating influence of an authority’s critical guidance.
At the same time, is it really the responsibility of a culture to slip a leaflet into each copy of Heart of Darkness, saying 'Africans are just as important and valuable as any other group. Conrad is a racist. Be nice. Be open-minded. Or else.’? And who gets to decide which pieces of information and artwork should be censored and controlled? I think Achebe’s contention that Conrad's novel fulfills some “Western desire and need” for superiority over other cultures (African cultures in this case) is an easier case to argue. “If the African characters in the Heart of Darkness cannot be accepted as peers with independent motivations (resembling those of the narrator and resembling ours) and an autonomous voice, pity is the response that remains” (788).
Charity events to assist impoverished Africans, such as Feed the Children, Live Aid concerts, the Peace Corps, and USAID have run for decades and are motivated by pity (among other factors). While some aid programs have helped people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other locations achieve economic independence and increase their quality of life, other programs have poor track records when it comes to actually assisting their recipients; such programs create cycles of aid dependence and perpetuate poverty (if the donations even reach their intended audience at all). Such aid programs may benefit their donors more than their recipients by allowing their (comparatively rich) sponsors to feel good about themselves by sending money to ostensibly help people. This situation echoes Achebe’s critique of Western-African power relationships: “the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa.” (792) Charity work provides a convenient venue to demonstrate superiority in this model, because the ability to help others and dictate the terms for the use of aid packages demonstrates the Western donors’ financial abundance (which they may also construe as moral superiority). But is this an accurate perception of Western-African power relationships at the moment? Is this a new colonialism?
[The Jump, if the code works right]
Achebe's article:
http://www.sjsu.edu/upload/course/course_6697/Achebe_An_Image_of_Africa.pdf
Achebe's argument, as applied to Conrad's novel:
Achebe’s charge that “White racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected” (788) may have some validity: symbolic contrasts of light and darkness permeates the events of Conrad’s narrative, elucidating the savage depravity inherent in all human souls by establishing physically dark African characters (and Europeans who imitate them) as examples of sub-human behavior. According to Achebe, “Conrad projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by a triumphant bestiality” (783). Conrad follows the symbolic codes of the Victorian era to enforce his distinction between the ‘pure, white European conqueror-masters’ and the ‘dirty, bloodthirsty African slaves/laborers’; this color-based dichotomization relies on Victorian cultural conceptions of Africa as 'The Dark Continent”, a paragon of evil and symbol of depravity.
Language is a key factor in Conrad’s establishment of European cultural superiority in Heart of Darkness, and the literal devoicing of African characters in the novel enforces their subhuman status. Conrad's audience is able to access and understand the motivations and perspectives of the European traders, sailors, and other workers through the British sailor Marlow's narration, but they have no comparable opportunity to listen to the thoughts and perspectives of the Congolese. The relative accessibility of the European narrative compared with the Congolese story requires the audience to privilege the European version of events and encourages them to sympathize with the Europeans’ struggles, while forcing them to ignore the astonishingly tragic mutilation and exploitation of Congolese citizens under the rule of the Belgian King Leopold (because the English narrator usually does). Linguistic incomprehensibility exoticizes the Congolese characters, and enforces their depiction as enigmatic and animal-like savages who lack rational thought and the literacy that symbolizes such intelligence.
Achebe’s 1975 criticism of an 1899 novel reflects cultural norms and expectations of earlier European and American societies, which may be less valid in the contemporary era of globalization where many Americans and Europeans presume some African citizens to be literate and intelligent, and are more personally familiar with educated African immigrants in their own communities. Although Conrad’s symbolic link between moral purity and European whiteness (and its correlative connection of African ethnic identity with savagery and evil) is less explicit in contemporary European and American cultures, the strength of the white/black, good/evil dichotomy in his novel may subconsciously introduce such racist concepts to new generations of readers without the mitigating influence of an authority’s critical guidance.
At the same time, is it really the responsibility of a culture to slip a leaflet into each copy of Heart of Darkness, saying 'Africans are just as important and valuable as any other group. Conrad is a racist. Be nice. Be open-minded. Or else.’? And who gets to decide which pieces of information and artwork should be censored and controlled? I think Achebe’s contention that Conrad's novel fulfills some “Western desire and need” for superiority over other cultures (African cultures in this case) is an easier case to argue. “If the African characters in the Heart of Darkness cannot be accepted as peers with independent motivations (resembling those of the narrator and resembling ours) and an autonomous voice, pity is the response that remains” (788).
Charity events to assist impoverished Africans, such as Feed the Children, Live Aid concerts, the Peace Corps, and USAID have run for decades and are motivated by pity (among other factors). While some aid programs have helped people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other locations achieve economic independence and increase their quality of life, other programs have poor track records when it comes to actually assisting their recipients; such programs create cycles of aid dependence and perpetuate poverty (if the donations even reach their intended audience at all). Such aid programs may benefit their donors more than their recipients by allowing their (comparatively rich) sponsors to feel good about themselves by sending money to ostensibly help people. This situation echoes Achebe’s critique of Western-African power relationships: “the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa.” (792) Charity work provides a convenient venue to demonstrate superiority in this model, because the ability to help others and dictate the terms for the use of aid packages demonstrates the Western donors’ financial abundance (which they may also construe as moral superiority). But is this an accurate perception of Western-African power relationships at the moment? Is this a new colonialism?
[The Jump, if the code works right]
Achebe's article:
http://www.sjsu.edu/upload/course/course_6697/Achebe_An_Image_of_Africa.pdf
Achebe's argument, as applied to Conrad's novel:
Achebe’s charge that “White racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected” (788) may have some validity: symbolic contrasts of light and darkness permeates the events of Conrad’s narrative, elucidating the savage depravity inherent in all human souls by establishing physically dark African characters (and Europeans who imitate them) as examples of sub-human behavior. According to Achebe, “Conrad projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by a triumphant bestiality” (783). Conrad follows the symbolic codes of the Victorian era to enforce his distinction between the ‘pure, white European conqueror-masters’ and the ‘dirty, bloodthirsty African slaves/laborers’; this color-based dichotomization relies on Victorian cultural conceptions of Africa as 'The Dark Continent”, a paragon of evil and symbol of depravity.
Language is a key factor in Conrad’s establishment of European cultural superiority in Heart of Darkness, and the literal devoicing of African characters in the novel enforces their subhuman status. Conrad's audience is able to access and understand the motivations and perspectives of the European traders, sailors, and other workers through the British sailor Marlow's narration, but they have no comparable opportunity to listen to the thoughts and perspectives of the Congolese. The relative accessibility of the European narrative compared with the Congolese story requires the audience to privilege the European version of events and encourages them to sympathize with the Europeans’ struggles, while forcing them to ignore the astonishingly tragic mutilation and exploitation of Congolese citizens under the rule of the Belgian King Leopold (because the English narrator usually does). Linguistic incomprehensibility exoticizes the Congolese characters, and enforces their depiction as enigmatic and animal-like savages who lack rational thought and the literacy that symbolizes such intelligence.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Outsiders to Post Colonialism
Here's my struggle: I want to latch on and say, "Right on! Western culture has been a dominating and homogenizing force for too long, suppressing other narratives as they struggle to be told!" But in saying so, I feel I am intruding on a silence that isn't mine, impressing upon the unspeakable/unsaid of a displaced culture. It isn't quite the same as men coming to feminism, the way I see it, because I can stand face to face with a man. I can question him, we speak (almost) the same language, and come from similar cultural traditions. Despite my sincerest efforts and best intentions to understand and embrace cultures other than my own, I can't escape the propensity to totalize.
I think aesthetic distance/obscurity might be the way out. It allows me to receive a nonwestern narrative in a way that forces me to grapple instead of sympathizing (because I certainly can't empathize) or condescending or trying to make the culture in question and my culture the same. I have to meet the work on its terms, instead of pulling it toward mine.
Except. Has anyone read the Posionwood Bible? Does anyone else find in it two almost totally alien cultures that are made distant as their stories are told? I'm thinking of Southern Baptist Culture and Congolese Culture, although perhaps the former is not so foreign to some. Anyway, it's by Barbara Kingsolver, and maybe I only love her work because she is rooted in biology, like I am, but it seems she somehow moves among the stories of other cultures with out dominating them or making them white. Poisonwood is one example, I think The Bean Trees is another (dealing with immigration). This rambled. My apologies. Thoughts?
I think aesthetic distance/obscurity might be the way out. It allows me to receive a nonwestern narrative in a way that forces me to grapple instead of sympathizing (because I certainly can't empathize) or condescending or trying to make the culture in question and my culture the same. I have to meet the work on its terms, instead of pulling it toward mine.
Except. Has anyone read the Posionwood Bible? Does anyone else find in it two almost totally alien cultures that are made distant as their stories are told? I'm thinking of Southern Baptist Culture and Congolese Culture, although perhaps the former is not so foreign to some. Anyway, it's by Barbara Kingsolver, and maybe I only love her work because she is rooted in biology, like I am, but it seems she somehow moves among the stories of other cultures with out dominating them or making them white. Poisonwood is one example, I think The Bean Trees is another (dealing with immigration). This rambled. My apologies. Thoughts?
Edward Said
Here are a couple links (I'm not very skilled with technology, so I can only offer you links, not embedded videos. I apologize.) to interviews with Edward Said in which he discusses his book Orientalism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njKVdFL6Kw
This is the one where he discusses humanism. Coincedentally, you can also learn French from this one, as, apparently, it originally aired on TV cinq.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_Cw
This is the one that we watched a clip from in class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njKVdFL6Kw
This is the one where he discusses humanism. Coincedentally, you can also learn French from this one, as, apparently, it originally aired on TV cinq.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_Cw
This is the one that we watched a clip from in class.
This doesn't directly relate to our current unit, but I ran across an article on the author of our article for today (Homi K. Bhabba) that I found interesting. This author apparently won a "Bad Writing" competition in 1998, where he was criticized for his jargon-filled prose.
http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm
However, what I found most interesting was his reaction to this, especially in context of what we have been constantly discussing in class. It was actually helpful to me to see a writer of this incredibly dense prose address the fact that he is, as Dr. Jenkins pointed out, almost writing in another language. But, then, as this language becomes more and more understandable, there is a beauty to it that "simple English" really couldn't express. We are deciphering the theorists as they are trying to decipher life.
"I have certainly been accused of using difficult words and complex formulations. I can only say that I use the language I need for my work. For instance, Hegel's book is difficult, but it's not that Hegel said: "How can I make my reader's life a misery?" He had certain references, allusions, and readings. In my case, such allusions also cause difficulties."
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/07/03/stories/2005070300020100.htm
Although it's kind of a short interview, there is a little context, a little exploration of cultural values. It was quite interesting.
... Not the bad definition of interesting, mind you.
http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm
However, what I found most interesting was his reaction to this, especially in context of what we have been constantly discussing in class. It was actually helpful to me to see a writer of this incredibly dense prose address the fact that he is, as Dr. Jenkins pointed out, almost writing in another language. But, then, as this language becomes more and more understandable, there is a beauty to it that "simple English" really couldn't express. We are deciphering the theorists as they are trying to decipher life.
"I have certainly been accused of using difficult words and complex formulations. I can only say that I use the language I need for my work. For instance, Hegel's book is difficult, but it's not that Hegel said: "How can I make my reader's life a misery?" He had certain references, allusions, and readings. In my case, such allusions also cause difficulties."
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/07/03/stories/2005070300020100.htm
Although it's kind of a short interview, there is a little context, a little exploration of cultural values. It was quite interesting.
... Not the bad definition of interesting, mind you.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Once Again: The Debate Over Literature
Monday, April 5, 2010
Kicking Sacred Cows
Kicking Sacred Cows:
The Christian Bible is probably one of the most studied and interpreted texts in literary history, and Biblical interpretation has had significant impact on political and cultural events for the last two thousand years (hello, Crusades!). Beyond its role in inflaming armed conflicts, the Bible has been a cornerstone of (Foucault-style) epistemological development in several European societies, and indirectly shaped the development of science, medicine, literature, technology, and art across the world. Biblical exegesis has shifted with historical developments and varied among cultures (further influencing Biblical interpretations), though many contemporary audiences forget the text's mutability of form and meaning through translation, editing, and other alterations. Luckily "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid MacCulloch can tell us all about it, or lazy people like me can catch the highlights in the New York Times' review of MacCulloch's book, conveniently written from the perspective of a New Historicist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Meacham-t.html
New York Times writer Jon Meacham leads a fascinating discussion of the development of Christian doctrine in MacCullock's book, and points out the significance of certain New Testament highlights to the Bible's earliest audiences. "For Christians, the answer to Pilate’s question about truth is the death and Resurrection of Jesus and what those events came to represent for believers. “Came to” is a key point, for the truth as Peter and the apostles saw it on that dark Friday was not the truth as 21st--century Christians see it. The work of discerning — or, depending on your point of view, assigning — meaning to the Passion and the story of the empty tomb was a historical as well as a theological process, as was the construction of the faith." The review then describes the process Jesus' disciples followed in interpreting the events of Jesus' life and teachings as they tried to reconcile his death and subsequent events with their Jewish messianic beliefs. These Jewish beliefs were unfamiliar to me, and I had heard very little about the active construction of Christian faith before the 4th century AD; the teachers of Christianity I've met have presented the Bible as a received text and events of the life of Jesus Christ as hardly questionable. Like a good New Historicist critic, Meacham then asks: "To what extent should holy books be read and interpreted critically and with a sense of the context in which they were written, rather than taken literally? His answer that "Christianity cannot be seen as a force beyond history, for it was conceived and is practiced according to historical bounds and within human limitations" could have come out of Bressler. Meacham's final message that religion is fluid and that historians have a role in determining belief and doctrine seems very relevant to New Historicism, and hints that the technique may still have a role in contemporary literary criticism.
The Christian Bible is probably one of the most studied and interpreted texts in literary history, and Biblical interpretation has had significant impact on political and cultural events for the last two thousand years (hello, Crusades!). Beyond its role in inflaming armed conflicts, the Bible has been a cornerstone of (Foucault-style) epistemological development in several European societies, and indirectly shaped the development of science, medicine, literature, technology, and art across the world. Biblical exegesis has shifted with historical developments and varied among cultures (further influencing Biblical interpretations), though many contemporary audiences forget the text's mutability of form and meaning through translation, editing, and other alterations. Luckily "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid MacCulloch can tell us all about it, or lazy people like me can catch the highlights in the New York Times' review of MacCulloch's book, conveniently written from the perspective of a New Historicist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Meacham-t.html
New York Times writer Jon Meacham leads a fascinating discussion of the development of Christian doctrine in MacCullock's book, and points out the significance of certain New Testament highlights to the Bible's earliest audiences. "For Christians, the answer to Pilate’s question about truth is the death and Resurrection of Jesus and what those events came to represent for believers. “Came to” is a key point, for the truth as Peter and the apostles saw it on that dark Friday was not the truth as 21st--century Christians see it. The work of discerning — or, depending on your point of view, assigning — meaning to the Passion and the story of the empty tomb was a historical as well as a theological process, as was the construction of the faith." The review then describes the process Jesus' disciples followed in interpreting the events of Jesus' life and teachings as they tried to reconcile his death and subsequent events with their Jewish messianic beliefs. These Jewish beliefs were unfamiliar to me, and I had heard very little about the active construction of Christian faith before the 4th century AD; the teachers of Christianity I've met have presented the Bible as a received text and events of the life of Jesus Christ as hardly questionable. Like a good New Historicist critic, Meacham then asks: "To what extent should holy books be read and interpreted critically and with a sense of the context in which they were written, rather than taken literally? His answer that "Christianity cannot be seen as a force beyond history, for it was conceived and is practiced according to historical bounds and within human limitations" could have come out of Bressler. Meacham's final message that religion is fluid and that historians have a role in determining belief and doctrine seems very relevant to New Historicism, and hints that the technique may still have a role in contemporary literary criticism.
As a History Major...
I feel that the field of History, at least nowadays, acknowledges to some extent the artificiality of history.
For example, in my Chinese Philosophy class, with pretty much every document we read, there is a discussion of the veracity of the document. In our unit on Zhuangzi, we discuss the fact that Zhuangzi might not have written anything that he supposedly wrote and that each part of a his treatise seems to have been written by a different source. We discuss how Zhuangzi is called a Daoist, but only by later sources; no source ascribed to him refers to him as a Daoist. And Daoism itself is surrounded by these sorts of questions; Laozi's existence can be called entirely into question, for example.
And pretty much every history course I've taken has been like this, one way or another. Even in classes where we didn't read historical documents we've discussed matters of interpretation. In one class, we read a source that claimed a ancient Greek play's negative portrayal of barbarians was supposed to be ironic, and the question of whether modern day conceptions of irony can be applied that far back came up.
There seems to be a sort of hierarchy of history, from what is popularly concieved as history to what is discussed as history among scholars, and at the top level the very concept of history does begin to break down. Of course, the concept isn't abandoned wholesale, but there is definetly an awarness of its artificiality.
For example, in my Chinese Philosophy class, with pretty much every document we read, there is a discussion of the veracity of the document. In our unit on Zhuangzi, we discuss the fact that Zhuangzi might not have written anything that he supposedly wrote and that each part of a his treatise seems to have been written by a different source. We discuss how Zhuangzi is called a Daoist, but only by later sources; no source ascribed to him refers to him as a Daoist. And Daoism itself is surrounded by these sorts of questions; Laozi's existence can be called entirely into question, for example.
And pretty much every history course I've taken has been like this, one way or another. Even in classes where we didn't read historical documents we've discussed matters of interpretation. In one class, we read a source that claimed a ancient Greek play's negative portrayal of barbarians was supposed to be ironic, and the question of whether modern day conceptions of irony can be applied that far back came up.
There seems to be a sort of hierarchy of history, from what is popularly concieved as history to what is discussed as history among scholars, and at the top level the very concept of history does begin to break down. Of course, the concept isn't abandoned wholesale, but there is definetly an awarness of its artificiality.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Apparently, Ke$ha is relevant to our class
But given our rather lengthy discussion over Lady Gaga, you'd expect that, right?
In this very long article/blog/whatever, the author draws from several influences in order to make the argument that "Tik Tok" is pretty much a plague on society...but still relevant. There's even a shoutout to Barthes in there.
http://martinseay.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/%E2%80%9Cain%E2%80%99t-got-a-care-in-the-world-but-got-plenty-of-beer-ain%E2%80%99t-got-no-money-in-my-pocket-but-i%E2%80%99m-already-here%E2%80%9D/
In this very long article/blog/whatever, the author draws from several influences in order to make the argument that "Tik Tok" is pretty much a plague on society...but still relevant. There's even a shoutout to Barthes in there.
http://martinseay.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/%E2%80%9Cain%E2%80%99t-got-a-care-in-the-world-but-got-plenty-of-beer-ain%E2%80%99t-got-no-money-in-my-pocket-but-i%E2%80%99m-already-here%E2%80%9D/
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Just what you need, more links to click on
Even though our feminism unit is technically over, I've found a couple posts from the innards of the internet that seem interesting and applicable.
This first one is about the Kotex ads that were rejected by 3 major television networks for saying the words "vagina" and "down there."
http://gawker.com/5494397/banned-from-tv-tampon-vagina
For a little comparison, here's an example of an ED ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6U7z-Nfr9M
(Throwing a football through a tire?? Honestly??)
Oh, commercials for "feminine hygiene products." If you weren't used to seeing them, you might not actually know what they were for. I think even the euphemism "feminine hygiene products" is pretty telling itself.
After reading the Foucault assignment, I'm curious about the wider use of language regarding womens' bodies, especially those functions that are unique to them.
This next link is about being child-free, from an environmental standpoint. However, as Kristeva's article mentioned destroying the myth of the archaic mother, it seems interesting that lessening the impending/current ecological disaster and freeing women may be closely related.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-30-gink-manifesto-say-it-loud-im-childfree-and-im-proud/
This first one is about the Kotex ads that were rejected by 3 major television networks for saying the words "vagina" and "down there."
http://gawker.com/5494397/banned-from-tv-tampon-vagina
For a little comparison, here's an example of an ED ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6U7z-Nfr9M
(Throwing a football through a tire?? Honestly??)
Oh, commercials for "feminine hygiene products." If you weren't used to seeing them, you might not actually know what they were for. I think even the euphemism "feminine hygiene products" is pretty telling itself.
After reading the Foucault assignment, I'm curious about the wider use of language regarding womens' bodies, especially those functions that are unique to them.
This next link is about being child-free, from an environmental standpoint. However, as Kristeva's article mentioned destroying the myth of the archaic mother, it seems interesting that lessening the impending/current ecological disaster and freeing women may be closely related.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-30-gink-manifesto-say-it-loud-im-childfree-and-im-proud/
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saussure's Women
I don’t read horoscopes. But the Urban Tulsa Weekly's Astrology section says:
“Libra:
In my role as moral sentinel, I strongly urge you not to watch "Telephone," the music video by Lady Gaga and Beyonce. It epitomizes everything that's crazy-making about our culture: brilliantly executed, gorgeous to behold, and perversely seductive, even though its subject matter is degrading, demoralizing, and devoid of meaning. In my role as a kick-ass educator, however, I encourage you to watch the video at least once. I think you'd benefit from seeing such an explicit embodiment of the crazy-making pressures you'll be wise to avoid exposing yourself to in the coming weeks.”
Lucky I’m not a Libra.
Anyway, in lieu of feeling obligated to see how crazy my future is going to be in the coming weeks, I thought I’d riff on Levy-Strauss’ discussion of women as signs near the end of the Rubin reading. Page 201
“For instance, Levi-Strauss sees women as being like words, which are misused when they are not "communicated" and exchanged. On the last page of a very long book, he observes that this creates something of a contradiction in women, since women are at the same time "speakers" and "spoken."
His only comment on this contradiction is this: But woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs. In the matrimonial dialogue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value."
This led me to think about our dear friend Saussure, grandfather of signs and signification, divider of signs into signifiers and signified. Translating Levy-Strauss into Saussurean terms, each woman would act as both {signifier/“speaker”/‘an individual with talents, a personality, and an identity which give them a unique value’} and {“spoken”/signified/‘a passive medium for the exchange of power and privilege between men’}.
This example may be demonstrated with classical musicians: listening to Yo Yo Ma play a certain cello composition is significantly different than listening to Zoe Keating play the same piece, but they’re both well-regarded professional cellists who transmit the notes of to an audience, and thus are somewhat interchangeable, though the audience’s experience of each performance would be different.
Choosing to credit Levy-Strauss’ interpretation of women as “being like words” for a moment, human culture does fit Saussure’s defining characteristics of language startlingly well.
(For this exercise, I have replaced Saussure’s term ‘language’ with ‘culture’; correlatively, ‘speech facts’ has become ‘human sociality’. ‘Speech’ becomes ‘the actions and experiences of an individual’, a graceless but descriptive phrase, and ‘signs’ becomes ‘social norms’.)
(From “A Course in General Linguistics”, Introduction)
These are the characteristics of [Culture]:
1) [Each culture] is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of [human sociality]”.
(The idea that each culture possesses and expresses a definite, unique nature underpins Anthropology as an academic field and forms the foundation for Levy-Strauss’ studies.)
“[Culture] is the social side of [the actions and experiences of an individual], outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of [culture]; a child assimilates it only gradually.”
(This scenario fits Levy-Strauss and Rubin’s description of gendered enculturation and the model of the Oedipal complex as an individual’s experience of the internalization of sexual norms and power structures in their culture.)
2) “[Culture], unlike [the actions and experiences of an individual member of that culture], is something that we can study separately” as a system.
(An individual’s experiences of their culture and the actions they take within that culture become the province of psychoanalysis and history rather than anthropology. Psychoanalysis leads to Freud and the second prong of Rubin’s analysis.)
3) “Whereas [an individual’s actions and experiences] is heterogeneous, [a culture], as defined, is homogeneous. It is a system of [social norms] in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and [actions], and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.”
(As Rubin notes, there’s nothing physiologically normative about the labor and social roles which women have taken in many human societies, especially considering the inversion of these roles in certain cultures such as female hunters and male childcare providers. This leaves psychological enculturation as the generator of these ‘absolute’ cultural truths.)
This correlation gets a little hazier around point four, but still works.
4) [Culture] is concrete, no less so than [an individual’s actions and experiences]; and this is a help in our study of it.”
(Cultures change over time, as do individuals, but Levy-Strauss might argue that a culture is so slow to change that an analyst could well consider it concrete for the purposes of their study. Furthermore, languages change over time in structure, vocabulary, and usage, so it’s reasonable to allow cultures and people to do the same thing.)
So, culture fits the definition of a language of human interaction, supporting Levy-Strauss’ conception of women as signifiers and signifieds in this structure. Rubin seeks to rewrite the roles of women in this structure, demolishing Levy-Strauss’ ideas, which she can do using Saussure’s own linguistic definitions.
Delving further into the essay:
“The bond between the signifier (‘woman’-ness) and the signified (Kekiya, an adult human female) is arbitrary”
(Initially this statement seems problematic. Levy-Strauss would argue that Kekiya is inherently ‘woman’, possessing woman-ness, and she doesn’t see a choice in whether she is a woman or not, partially because this identity has been culturally instilled in her. Rubin, in calling for a deemphasis of physical structures as signifiers of gendered identity, and even the end of gendered identity as an important signifier in her culture, aspires to make this signifier-signified connection arbitrary.)
Saussure enforces Rubin’s reading of this relationship “Every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior, or – what amounts to the same thing – on convention”. (We only have cultures and languages because enough people repeated mutually-intelligible actions and sounds until they became the normative, universal code for their group.)
His subsequent sentence could have come straight from Levy-Strauss: “Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them.”
Even so, there is some natural connection between female bodies and the assignation of ‘woman identity’, leading to the expectations of this female-bodied person to express woman-ness in behaviors and social roles.
“The symbol [female body] is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier [female body] and the signified [expectation of woman-identity]. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.”
Under a Saussurean view of the world, Rubin is not trying to entirely deconstruct biological female as a category, but rather to reintroduce the arbitrary relationship between this person’s role as a signifier in their culture (who is usually assigned to the category ‘woman’) and what she signifies, simply following Saussure’s own definition of arbitrary-ness.
Deconstruction of the concept of womanhood will not leave the female body completely indistinguishable from the male body, but will decouple it from several expectations of ‘woman-ness’ that limit that person’s social capabilities and sexual roles.
Saussure claims “language is a social institution”, making it a carrier of culture. The vocabulary and grammar of their language define people’s perceptions of the world, as well as the ways they are able to think about the world and their potential actions in it. (Levy-Strauss demonstrates this in his discussion of the role kinship terms play in creating sexual taboos.) To change the cultural perceptions of ‘woman’ and enact the “elimination of the social system which creates sexism and gender”, as Rubin proposes at the end of her essay, we would have to change the linguistic codification of (male and female) participants. Deemphasizing masculinity and femininity in language, perhaps through the recrafting of pronouns among other changes to less directly reflect the sex of the speaker, seems to be a necessary step in the refashioning of identity in our society to deemphasize the phenotype of the speaker (and all of the cultural baggage that phenotype entails) and to move toward Rubin’s ideal “elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles”.
“Libra:
In my role as moral sentinel, I strongly urge you not to watch "Telephone," the music video by Lady Gaga and Beyonce. It epitomizes everything that's crazy-making about our culture: brilliantly executed, gorgeous to behold, and perversely seductive, even though its subject matter is degrading, demoralizing, and devoid of meaning. In my role as a kick-ass educator, however, I encourage you to watch the video at least once. I think you'd benefit from seeing such an explicit embodiment of the crazy-making pressures you'll be wise to avoid exposing yourself to in the coming weeks.”
Lucky I’m not a Libra.
Anyway, in lieu of feeling obligated to see how crazy my future is going to be in the coming weeks, I thought I’d riff on Levy-Strauss’ discussion of women as signs near the end of the Rubin reading. Page 201
“For instance, Levi-Strauss sees women as being like words, which are misused when they are not "communicated" and exchanged. On the last page of a very long book, he observes that this creates something of a contradiction in women, since women are at the same time "speakers" and "spoken."
His only comment on this contradiction is this: But woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs. In the matrimonial dialogue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value."
This led me to think about our dear friend Saussure, grandfather of signs and signification, divider of signs into signifiers and signified. Translating Levy-Strauss into Saussurean terms, each woman would act as both {signifier/“speaker”/‘an individual with talents, a personality, and an identity which give them a unique value’} and {“spoken”/signified/‘a passive medium for the exchange of power and privilege between men’}.
This example may be demonstrated with classical musicians: listening to Yo Yo Ma play a certain cello composition is significantly different than listening to Zoe Keating play the same piece, but they’re both well-regarded professional cellists who transmit the notes of
Choosing to credit Levy-Strauss’ interpretation of women as “being like words” for a moment, human culture does fit Saussure’s defining characteristics of language startlingly well.
(For this exercise, I have replaced Saussure’s term ‘language’ with ‘culture’; correlatively, ‘speech facts’ has become ‘human sociality’. ‘Speech’ becomes ‘the actions and experiences of an individual’, a graceless but descriptive phrase, and ‘signs’ becomes ‘social norms’.)
(From “A Course in General Linguistics”, Introduction)
These are the characteristics of [Culture]:
1) [Each culture] is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of [human sociality]”.
(The idea that each culture possesses and expresses a definite, unique nature underpins Anthropology as an academic field and forms the foundation for Levy-Strauss’ studies.)
“[Culture] is the social side of [the actions and experiences of an individual], outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of [culture]; a child assimilates it only gradually.”
(This scenario fits Levy-Strauss and Rubin’s description of gendered enculturation and the model of the Oedipal complex as an individual’s experience of the internalization of sexual norms and power structures in their culture.)
2) “[Culture], unlike [the actions and experiences of an individual member of that culture], is something that we can study separately” as a system.
(An individual’s experiences of their culture and the actions they take within that culture become the province of psychoanalysis and history rather than anthropology. Psychoanalysis leads to Freud and the second prong of Rubin’s analysis.)
3) “Whereas [an individual’s actions and experiences] is heterogeneous, [a culture], as defined, is homogeneous. It is a system of [social norms] in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and [actions], and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.”
(As Rubin notes, there’s nothing physiologically normative about the labor and social roles which women have taken in many human societies, especially considering the inversion of these roles in certain cultures such as female hunters and male childcare providers. This leaves psychological enculturation as the generator of these ‘absolute’ cultural truths.)
This correlation gets a little hazier around point four, but still works.
4) [Culture] is concrete, no less so than [an individual’s actions and experiences]; and this is a help in our study of it.”
(Cultures change over time, as do individuals, but Levy-Strauss might argue that a culture is so slow to change that an analyst could well consider it concrete for the purposes of their study. Furthermore, languages change over time in structure, vocabulary, and usage, so it’s reasonable to allow cultures and people to do the same thing.)
So, culture fits the definition of a language of human interaction, supporting Levy-Strauss’ conception of women as signifiers and signifieds in this structure. Rubin seeks to rewrite the roles of women in this structure, demolishing Levy-Strauss’ ideas, which she can do using Saussure’s own linguistic definitions.
Delving further into the essay:
“The bond between the signifier (‘woman’-ness) and the signified (Kekiya, an adult human female) is arbitrary”
(Initially this statement seems problematic. Levy-Strauss would argue that Kekiya is inherently ‘woman’, possessing woman-ness, and she doesn’t see a choice in whether she is a woman or not, partially because this identity has been culturally instilled in her. Rubin, in calling for a deemphasis of physical structures as signifiers of gendered identity, and even the end of gendered identity as an important signifier in her culture, aspires to make this signifier-signified connection arbitrary.)
Saussure enforces Rubin’s reading of this relationship “Every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior, or – what amounts to the same thing – on convention”. (We only have cultures and languages because enough people repeated mutually-intelligible actions and sounds until they became the normative, universal code for their group.)
His subsequent sentence could have come straight from Levy-Strauss: “Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them.”
Even so, there is some natural connection between female bodies and the assignation of ‘woman identity’, leading to the expectations of this female-bodied person to express woman-ness in behaviors and social roles.
“The symbol [female body] is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier [female body] and the signified [expectation of woman-identity]. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.”
Under a Saussurean view of the world, Rubin is not trying to entirely deconstruct biological female as a category, but rather to reintroduce the arbitrary relationship between this person’s role as a signifier in their culture (who is usually assigned to the category ‘woman’) and what she signifies, simply following Saussure’s own definition of arbitrary-ness.
Deconstruction of the concept of womanhood will not leave the female body completely indistinguishable from the male body, but will decouple it from several expectations of ‘woman-ness’ that limit that person’s social capabilities and sexual roles.
Saussure claims “language is a social institution”, making it a carrier of culture. The vocabulary and grammar of their language define people’s perceptions of the world, as well as the ways they are able to think about the world and their potential actions in it. (Levy-Strauss demonstrates this in his discussion of the role kinship terms play in creating sexual taboos.) To change the cultural perceptions of ‘woman’ and enact the “elimination of the social system which creates sexism and gender”, as Rubin proposes at the end of her essay, we would have to change the linguistic codification of (male and female) participants. Deemphasizing masculinity and femininity in language, perhaps through the recrafting of pronouns among other changes to less directly reflect the sex of the speaker, seems to be a necessary step in the refashioning of identity in our society to deemphasize the phenotype of the speaker (and all of the cultural baggage that phenotype entails) and to move toward Rubin’s ideal “elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles”.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
one last thing about feminism
One last thing about feminism before we move on, regarding the question of whether it is more fulfilling for a woman to experience motherhood or to pursue her career…
After seeing the movie Marley and Me, I was talking with a friend, and we agreed that it was sad, but for completely different reasons. I thought the most heartbreaking thing was watching the children cry; my friend thought the saddest thing was that the mom had to give up her blossoming career in order to have a family. I remember thinking that was an absurd interpretation, especially because in the movie she specifically says that what she gained out of becoming a mother was worth more than what she'd had to give up. Honestly, I might have momentarily judged my friend as a little “cold” and she may have momentarily judged me as a little “dumb” after this discussion.
I usually try not to be a relativist, but in cases like this, it’s difficult to say anything but, “People are different. Different things make us happy.” This is of course right in line with the idea of having feminisms instead of one theory of feminism, and Kristeva’s Women's time. Women don’t all have to strive to be “the woman” or even to try to define what “the woman” is—maybe she isn't , but they (shes) are. Still, each woman has to choose for herself what true womanhood manifests itself as.
After seeing the movie Marley and Me, I was talking with a friend, and we agreed that it was sad, but for completely different reasons. I thought the most heartbreaking thing was watching the children cry; my friend thought the saddest thing was that the mom had to give up her blossoming career in order to have a family. I remember thinking that was an absurd interpretation, especially because in the movie she specifically says that what she gained out of becoming a mother was worth more than what she'd had to give up. Honestly, I might have momentarily judged my friend as a little “cold” and she may have momentarily judged me as a little “dumb” after this discussion.
I usually try not to be a relativist, but in cases like this, it’s difficult to say anything but, “People are different. Different things make us happy.” This is of course right in line with the idea of having feminisms instead of one theory of feminism, and Kristeva’s Women's time. Women don’t all have to strive to be “the woman” or even to try to define what “the woman” is—maybe she isn't , but they (shes) are. Still, each woman has to choose for herself what true womanhood manifests itself as.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Lady GaGa
Clean Version:
Explicit Version: http://www.vevo.com/watch/lady-gaga/telephone-official-explicit-version/USUV71000338
Explicit Version: http://www.vevo.com/watch/lady-gaga/telephone-official-explicit-version/USUV71000338
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
"My Parents' Failed Experiment in Gender Neutrality"
http://www.newsweek.com/id/235300?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+newsweek/TopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
I saw this article from Newsweek, and thought it apropos to our feminism discussions. The author maintains that gender-neutrality is nigh impossible, based on personal experience in the attempt.
If gender neutrality is impossible, then does this mean that we can't break (or soften, maybe) the male/female binary? Or does it mean that instead of erasing gender distinctions, we need to allow for a plethora of distinctions?
I saw this article from Newsweek, and thought it apropos to our feminism discussions. The author maintains that gender-neutrality is nigh impossible, based on personal experience in the attempt.
If gender neutrality is impossible, then does this mean that we can't break (or soften, maybe) the male/female binary? Or does it mean that instead of erasing gender distinctions, we need to allow for a plethora of distinctions?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Derrida & Daniel Quinn
From Structure, Sign, and Play:
“The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing,’ ‘out of whole cloth,’ would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. The notion of the engineer who supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur” (88)
From Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael:
“Any story that explains the meaning of the world, the intentions of the gods, and the destiny of man is bound to be mythology.”
“That may be so, but I’m not aware of anything remotely like that. As far as I know, there’s nothing in our culture that could be called mythology, unless you’re talking about Greek mythology or Norse mythology or something like that.”
“I’m talking about living mythology. Not recorded in any book—recorded in the minds of people of your culture, and being enacted all over the world even as we sit here and speak of it” (44).
“Naturally you wouldn’t consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It’s just the story”
“Okay, but the story I’m talking about is definitely not a myth. Parts of it are still in question, I suppose, and I suppose later research might make some revisions in it, but it’s certainly not a myth” (50).
The portion of Structure, Sign, and Play when Derrida is discussing Lévi-Strauss’ ideas of the bricoleur, bricolage, and the engineer reminded me (sort of) of the beginning of Ishmael (a super brief synopsis of this in case you haven’t read it is that there is a talking, sage gorilla who places want ads for students. He recruits a middle-aged man who is angry that many of the aims of the hippies never really panned out. The Gorilla then teaches him the error of Westerner’s ways, generally in regards to their lack of environmentalism.) when the gorilla’s new student is reluctant to believe that the story of Western (specifically American) culture (again, more specifically, the creation story in this excerpt) is a myth in the same way that Greek mythology is constituted of myths. This is very hard for him to buy off on—most Americans, like this student, it seems, believe that whatever engineer they are choosing (whether it be science, God, whatever) is not as crazy and fantastical as what the Greeks once thought about Zeus and company, that their beliefs are rooted in fact. Yet, Derrida points out that the engineer is “produced by the bricoleur,” that the idea of a difference between the bricoleur and the engineer “breaks down.” Everything is referential, and no knowledge can accurately claim to come from any one, true origin. Every creation story is just a myth that you can choose to trust or not because, somewhere down the line, each one of them will probably seem silly and outdated in the same way that the Greek’s notions seem to us now.
“The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing,’ ‘out of whole cloth,’ would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. The notion of the engineer who supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur” (88)
From Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael:
“Any story that explains the meaning of the world, the intentions of the gods, and the destiny of man is bound to be mythology.”
“That may be so, but I’m not aware of anything remotely like that. As far as I know, there’s nothing in our culture that could be called mythology, unless you’re talking about Greek mythology or Norse mythology or something like that.”
“I’m talking about living mythology. Not recorded in any book—recorded in the minds of people of your culture, and being enacted all over the world even as we sit here and speak of it” (44).
“Naturally you wouldn’t consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It’s just the story”
“Okay, but the story I’m talking about is definitely not a myth. Parts of it are still in question, I suppose, and I suppose later research might make some revisions in it, but it’s certainly not a myth” (50).
The portion of Structure, Sign, and Play when Derrida is discussing Lévi-Strauss’ ideas of the bricoleur, bricolage, and the engineer reminded me (sort of) of the beginning of Ishmael (a super brief synopsis of this in case you haven’t read it is that there is a talking, sage gorilla who places want ads for students. He recruits a middle-aged man who is angry that many of the aims of the hippies never really panned out. The Gorilla then teaches him the error of Westerner’s ways, generally in regards to their lack of environmentalism.) when the gorilla’s new student is reluctant to believe that the story of Western (specifically American) culture (again, more specifically, the creation story in this excerpt) is a myth in the same way that Greek mythology is constituted of myths. This is very hard for him to buy off on—most Americans, like this student, it seems, believe that whatever engineer they are choosing (whether it be science, God, whatever) is not as crazy and fantastical as what the Greeks once thought about Zeus and company, that their beliefs are rooted in fact. Yet, Derrida points out that the engineer is “produced by the bricoleur,” that the idea of a difference between the bricoleur and the engineer “breaks down.” Everything is referential, and no knowledge can accurately claim to come from any one, true origin. Every creation story is just a myth that you can choose to trust or not because, somewhere down the line, each one of them will probably seem silly and outdated in the same way that the Greek’s notions seem to us now.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Saussure (among other things)
The first part of this post might come off a little bit naively “if we could only learn to love one other, the world would be a much better place,” but, alas, I guess that is the risk I am running.
So, I was re-reading Saussure in order to start catching up on the blog, and, it struck me that at least a few of the theorists we have read emphasize difference. For Saussure, all of language is based on difference—you can only truly know the full meaning of one word in its differences from another word. “Synonyms like French redouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors” (969). Some feminists also strive to emphasize the differences between men and women, to make, as Kristeva puts it, “a necessary identification between the two sexes as the only and unique means for liberating the ‘second sex’” (21) (sort of, it seemed to me, to not make women the new men, but to make women the new women). And Levinas seemed to praise literature for its ability to allow us to respect the view of the Other without trying to subvert it into the I. Difference, for all of them, seems to be good, to be inevitable. It is a functional part of life that may as well (or, in Saussure’s case, that cannot help but) be embraced.
Another, really unrelated thing that I thought when reading Saussure—this is what makes it so difficult to learn another language. It’s hard to master all the intricacies of a system, which, to him, is what language is. It takes a long time to master this even the first time, so when you add having to constantly try to translate things and understand another language through your own language, suddenly things get very difficult. I have taken French for many years, and, recently, the goal of fluency only seems harder to reach. If language were not a system, maybe I could accomplish it; if all I had to do was just memorize a long list of single, isolated words, I might have it made, but, instead, it seems that, at best, what I will have is the ability to use pre-programmed sentences that cover basic situations. I could never be myself in French because I do not think that I will be able to master a whole other system, to get to the point where I do not have to mediate their language through my own system.
So, I was re-reading Saussure in order to start catching up on the blog, and, it struck me that at least a few of the theorists we have read emphasize difference. For Saussure, all of language is based on difference—you can only truly know the full meaning of one word in its differences from another word. “Synonyms like French redouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors” (969). Some feminists also strive to emphasize the differences between men and women, to make, as Kristeva puts it, “a necessary identification between the two sexes as the only and unique means for liberating the ‘second sex’” (21) (sort of, it seemed to me, to not make women the new men, but to make women the new women). And Levinas seemed to praise literature for its ability to allow us to respect the view of the Other without trying to subvert it into the I. Difference, for all of them, seems to be good, to be inevitable. It is a functional part of life that may as well (or, in Saussure’s case, that cannot help but) be embraced.
Another, really unrelated thing that I thought when reading Saussure—this is what makes it so difficult to learn another language. It’s hard to master all the intricacies of a system, which, to him, is what language is. It takes a long time to master this even the first time, so when you add having to constantly try to translate things and understand another language through your own language, suddenly things get very difficult. I have taken French for many years, and, recently, the goal of fluency only seems harder to reach. If language were not a system, maybe I could accomplish it; if all I had to do was just memorize a long list of single, isolated words, I might have it made, but, instead, it seems that, at best, what I will have is the ability to use pre-programmed sentences that cover basic situations. I could never be myself in French because I do not think that I will be able to master a whole other system, to get to the point where I do not have to mediate their language through my own system.
‘Third Wave Hits Economic Crisis, Drowning Few’
'This just in from the econometrics desk: highly-educated women concerned with healthy lifestyles and feminist values find a graceful way to bow out of the rat race. Femivores replace forty-hour workweek grinds with mortar and pestle action, growing their own salads, crafting clothing, and shuttling young kids about town. Billed as a form of family contribution that replaces wages with household labor and creativity, femivorism promotes self-sufficiency and autonomy through the ‘housewifely’ tasks second wave feminists rejected in their pursuit of de jure employment equality.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/magazine/14fob-wwln-t.html?scp=4&sq=gardening&st=cse
Femivores have salient points: one workplace does not fit all, domestic labor is expensive and valuable, and primary caretakers have greater incentive (and perhaps greater ability) to provide a high quality of life for their family than large corporations. Femivores provide necessary products and services that their family would otherwise need to buy, substituting their personal labor for the paycheck they would need to earn to buy necessary products.
I have to wonder whether this willing return to household employment is becoming socially acceptable (even hip) because we’re in a time of higher unemployment, strong valuation of (expensive) environmentally-friendly organic produce and products, and widespread internet communities that support disparate individuals with similar interests. Are femivores greenwashing their housework to legitimize their actions in the eyes of a politically-correct and often unsympathetic public? Is femivorism only possible in upper middle-class enclaves where one paycheck can pay the bills, making domestic work the new leisure activity of the bourgeois? And would men who are interested in being their family’s femivore gain an equal level of acceptance and support for their choice to stay at home and milk the cows?
I’d love to answer these questions myself, but I have a load of towels to fold.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sex/Gender preferences
I haven't quite made it to the end of this article--"Worldwide war on baby girls" from The Economist--yet, but I thought I would share it because, if nothing else, it shows the continued need for feminism. A quote from it: "Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count."
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15636231
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15636231
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Auracular Spectacular
I'm going to take it back a few modules. Hope no one minds...
A while ago, my friend and I were in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and we were kind of bored. So, we went to a "new age" (I guess that is what you would call it) store to buy some tarot cards that we could use to pass some time. At the store, they were offering the opportunity to have your aura photographed and the resulting picture analyzed. This cost something mildly absurd like $20 each, so we declined the offer, but we did see an example. It was just a person's head surrounded by a strange, colorful halo. It seemed that the color and size of it would be what the analyzer based the meaning off of. We regretted not getting the pictures at the time, but looking back on it, more than the price of the thing was absurd--the whole concept was too. Isn't it pardoxical/ironic to have your aura photgraphed? Doesn't a photograph strip the subject of her aura? I do not think that Benjamin would think that photographing an aura is possible, and it seems to me now that it was just an overpriced gimmick (though, I will say, an interesting gimmick nonetheless).
A while ago, my friend and I were in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and we were kind of bored. So, we went to a "new age" (I guess that is what you would call it) store to buy some tarot cards that we could use to pass some time. At the store, they were offering the opportunity to have your aura photographed and the resulting picture analyzed. This cost something mildly absurd like $20 each, so we declined the offer, but we did see an example. It was just a person's head surrounded by a strange, colorful halo. It seemed that the color and size of it would be what the analyzer based the meaning off of. We regretted not getting the pictures at the time, but looking back on it, more than the price of the thing was absurd--the whole concept was too. Isn't it pardoxical/ironic to have your aura photgraphed? Doesn't a photograph strip the subject of her aura? I do not think that Benjamin would think that photographing an aura is possible, and it seems to me now that it was just an overpriced gimmick (though, I will say, an interesting gimmick nonetheless).
Monday, March 8, 2010
"The Other"
In the Bressler text as well as the Simone de Beauvoir text, the issue of woman as "the Other" comes out. I find this description quite irritating. As a woman, I obviously don't believe that I should be considered as something "other" than "essential" (I'm drawing this from de Beauvoir). My place in the world is just as significant as any other human's, regardless of the sex I happen to be. Reading all the various misogynistic descriptions of women by highly regarded men authors really struck me. I had a faint idea of their opinions based on reading their work, but their blatant remarks, like those from Vonnegut,-- "Educating a woman is like pouring honey over a fine Swiss watch. It stops working." --really amaze me (Bressler 170). I'm glad we're covering Feminism so I can see evidence of this annoyingly abundant attitude from otherwise respectable men. Bleh!
Some thoughts before we leave poststructuralism behind forever...
I am still not sure how much I like it. It has provided some incredibly powerful tools, which I like a great deal. It has contributed to the critical theory in other disciplines, which I also appreciate.
The philosophy side of my poor, fractured psyche doesn't much care for poststructuralism, though. In fact, that particular part of my brain actually rebels at several poststructuralist ideas. The idea that all systems must be based entirely within language doesn't bother me at all. The idea that because of this "center-less center" nothing we attempt will be free from previously enacted linguistic constraints and tendencies is alright, I suppose, but why analyze if truth (or even accuracy) is not available to analysis?
I understand that the lack of any truth separate from language allows for multiple interpretations of reality to be equally subjectively valid, and for all intents and purposes, even objectively valid. That doesn't actually bother me. What bothers me is using this idea to perform analysis. Or rather: its sweeping success in performing analysis over and above other, *equally valid* modes of interpretation.
Perhaps this is a misunderstanding on my part. Maybe poststructuralism doesn't actually suggest that almost an infinite number of interpretations are available and valid; maybe it withholds that from other theories. Or maybe it does suggest it, and in fact actually allows the validity of other theories. (I suspect this will be the most argued for position.) But it seems to me that, at least in part, contemporary criticism favors poststructuralist ideas over other theoretical models.
This isn't even really a problem: I'm all for making appropriate use of the best available theory, even when it means leaving other theories in the dust. What seems problematic is that by becoming hegemonic over literary analysis, poststructuralism and especially deconstructionism have undermined their own argument completely by accident. If the best literary critics in the world are all deconstructionists (which is a silly example, but I'm throwing it out there anyway) then we do not see a nearly infinite number of equally valid interpretations. Instead, we see the group that knows what they're doing favoring one interpretation, or a set of interpretations, and thereby we also see that one set of interpretations is, if not more valid, at least far more useful and embraced by experts.
Now, there are ways out of this purely hypothetical situation that I have drawn out for far too long already. But "the ways out" kind of bother me too. For example, maintaining that deconstructionism is not a structure does remove some problems, but also introduces others. One the one hand we might be left frantically disguising systematicity, and pushing the center-less center's origin back into the past indefinitely; and infinite regression is not a nice way to begin any theory. On the other hand, however, we could end up engaged in a never-ending, quasi-Maoist revolution: told by the dominant power to rebel in ways that the dominant power prescribes, and reassured that it is in this perpetual (and meaningless) revolution that culture exists.
Obviously, this all comes with the rather glaring caveat: I don't know quite enough about current literary criticism to make competent judgments. Maybe these problems have been handily solved. Maybe they are simply disregarded for the pragmatically excellent quality of the results. I''m totally thrilled if that is the case. I really want poststructuralist theory to work. It is such a powerful philosophical framework from which to interpret literature that I can't help admiring it. But I have lingering fears that the whole thing is built on air, and that it could all come crashing down at any time. I'm afraid somebody will point out that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, and that all along he was only wearing a great deal of tragically flawed theory.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Numbers, Science, Words
This was initially going to be a comment in response to Amelia's post, but as I started writing I realized it would be a ridiculously long comment, and that practically no one reads the comments (otherwise there would be more than one or two comments per post, for sure).
So. Science and Play.
If we're going to talk about science, do we start with numbers or observation? Either way, aren't we endeavoring to describe? The general public likes to think of math and science as completely objective. Most people like to believe that there are things we can know. One oxygen plus two hydrogens is water, force = mass times acceleration, the Earth orbits the sun, gravity keeps us stuck to the ground, genes are translated into proteins. But good scientists will say that they can never know.
We like to think that numbers are more precise than language, that they afford certainty. 1=1. But 0.99999(and so on) also equals one. Imaginary numbers are important, but they don't exist in nature. We like to believe that numbers are extrinsic: "my kitty has 2 eyes and 4 legs and one tail." But as this article explains, numbers, like language, are something we made up. Does my kitty know that two bowls of ice cream (my kitty likes ice cream) is more than one bowl of ice cream? Sure. But I doubt she thinks of them as "one" and "two."
Science, especially biology, is often descriptive and highly variable. We strive for repeatability in experiments, especially in a clinical setting, but repeatability and certainty are not the same. Correlation and causation are not the same. For example, you may have heard that Lancet, an eminent medical journal, published a study that linked vaccines to autism. This led to mass hysteria and conspiracy theories galore. Some parents took the dangerous, stupid (sorry, I plan to be a public health professional, so it's difficult not to judge this behavior)step of refusing to vaccinate their children. This is how previously eradicated diseases make their way back into the population. The author of the study has since been discredited and Lancet has retracted the article.
You were probably taught about kingdoms in high school bio, right? Well, that system of classification was just that: a system. And, like the system of language Derrida describes, once you look a little closer, the system breaks down. There are organisms that don't fit neatly into the phylogeny proposed by the kingdom model.
At this point, biologists classify organisms as prokaryotes and eukaryotes: lacking nuclei and having nuclei. Even this is not sufficient, because it doesn't tell the whole story. The prokaryotes can be broken down into the bacteria and the archaea. And the archaea are more closely related to eukarya than they are to bacteria! We name things so that we can think about them and talk to others about them. The names we assign may have very little to do with what something is.
Further, individuals perform scientific experiments. Their conclusions about their results are subjective. Whether or not they public their work is often an individual choice, and in many fields negative results (in which the tested hypothesis is not supported) are less likely to be published than positive results, skewing the body of scientific literature available to other researchers and the general public.
Once a paper is published, the results of an important study often make their way to the general public via the news media. Why are news stories about scientific studies so much more sensational than the studies themselves? Why do they so often misinterpret results or present them in a misleading context? Language! There is a break down, an unfilled gap, between the language of science and the language of popular culture. We return again to the outrageous sensationalization of the "link" between vaccines and autism.
There's so much more that could be said about this topic, and I'm itching to stick with the biology-meets-literary theory track, but I think this is turning rambly already.
So. Science and Play.
If we're going to talk about science, do we start with numbers or observation? Either way, aren't we endeavoring to describe? The general public likes to think of math and science as completely objective. Most people like to believe that there are things we can know. One oxygen plus two hydrogens is water, force = mass times acceleration, the Earth orbits the sun, gravity keeps us stuck to the ground, genes are translated into proteins. But good scientists will say that they can never know.
We like to think that numbers are more precise than language, that they afford certainty. 1=1. But 0.99999(and so on) also equals one. Imaginary numbers are important, but they don't exist in nature. We like to believe that numbers are extrinsic: "my kitty has 2 eyes and 4 legs and one tail." But as this article explains, numbers, like language, are something we made up. Does my kitty know that two bowls of ice cream (my kitty likes ice cream) is more than one bowl of ice cream? Sure. But I doubt she thinks of them as "one" and "two."
Science, especially biology, is often descriptive and highly variable. We strive for repeatability in experiments, especially in a clinical setting, but repeatability and certainty are not the same. Correlation and causation are not the same. For example, you may have heard that Lancet, an eminent medical journal, published a study that linked vaccines to autism. This led to mass hysteria and conspiracy theories galore. Some parents took the dangerous, stupid (sorry, I plan to be a public health professional, so it's difficult not to judge this behavior)step of refusing to vaccinate their children. This is how previously eradicated diseases make their way back into the population. The author of the study has since been discredited and Lancet has retracted the article.
You were probably taught about kingdoms in high school bio, right? Well, that system of classification was just that: a system. And, like the system of language Derrida describes, once you look a little closer, the system breaks down. There are organisms that don't fit neatly into the phylogeny proposed by the kingdom model.
At this point, biologists classify organisms as prokaryotes and eukaryotes: lacking nuclei and having nuclei. Even this is not sufficient, because it doesn't tell the whole story. The prokaryotes can be broken down into the bacteria and the archaea. And the archaea are more closely related to eukarya than they are to bacteria! We name things so that we can think about them and talk to others about them. The names we assign may have very little to do with what something is.
Further, individuals perform scientific experiments. Their conclusions about their results are subjective. Whether or not they public their work is often an individual choice, and in many fields negative results (in which the tested hypothesis is not supported) are less likely to be published than positive results, skewing the body of scientific literature available to other researchers and the general public.
Once a paper is published, the results of an important study often make their way to the general public via the news media. Why are news stories about scientific studies so much more sensational than the studies themselves? Why do they so often misinterpret results or present them in a misleading context? Language! There is a break down, an unfilled gap, between the language of science and the language of popular culture. We return again to the outrageous sensationalization of the "link" between vaccines and autism.
There's so much more that could be said about this topic, and I'm itching to stick with the biology-meets-literary theory track, but I think this is turning rambly already.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Derrida and Heisenberg
I got an essay assignment while we were doing these readings... bad deal. Either way, I think I'll kill two birds with one stone by talking about it a bit here.
In his book "Physics and Philosophy," Werner Heisenberg writes that "We know any understanding must be based finally upon the natural language because it is only there that we can begin to touch reality, and hence we must be skeptical about any skepticism with regard to this natural language and its essential concepts” (Heisenberg 176). In this passage, he's struggling with the effects of language on science; basically, the guy knows that there can never be a completely logical and objective scientific language, because language is intrinsically not objective. "Other structures may arise from associations between certain meanings of words; for instance, a secondary meaning of a word which passes only vaguely through the mind when the voice is heard… [contributing] essentially to the content of a sentence” (Heisenberg 144).
At this point, I almost wish he hadn't admitted to such a thing, because it reminded me immediately of what we are reading. At the most basic level, I suppose that I'm saying that this means that science is open to Derrida's ideas of play and différance. In his essay "Différance," he describes how all knowledge refers to other things, other words, other kinds of consciousness--there is no other way to imagine it.
I'd really like to know what this means for science. I've already come to understand why many writers describe it as a social construct (Kuhn), but describing it as a construct of language seems to be a much, much bigger jump. Kuhn wrote that scientists pretty much just have to accept their methods and their languages because there is no other way we know how to look for "facts," and Heisenberg seems to be willing to do the same thing. But once we understand science in this way, I think it raises questions about the nature of our knowledge and even our perception.
In his book "Physics and Philosophy," Werner Heisenberg writes that "We know any understanding must be based finally upon the natural language because it is only there that we can begin to touch reality, and hence we must be skeptical about any skepticism with regard to this natural language and its essential concepts” (Heisenberg 176). In this passage, he's struggling with the effects of language on science; basically, the guy knows that there can never be a completely logical and objective scientific language, because language is intrinsically not objective. "Other structures may arise from associations between certain meanings of words; for instance, a secondary meaning of a word which passes only vaguely through the mind when the voice is heard… [contributing] essentially to the content of a sentence” (Heisenberg 144).
At this point, I almost wish he hadn't admitted to such a thing, because it reminded me immediately of what we are reading. At the most basic level, I suppose that I'm saying that this means that science is open to Derrida's ideas of play and différance. In his essay "Différance," he describes how all knowledge refers to other things, other words, other kinds of consciousness--there is no other way to imagine it.
I'd really like to know what this means for science. I've already come to understand why many writers describe it as a social construct (Kuhn), but describing it as a construct of language seems to be a much, much bigger jump. Kuhn wrote that scientists pretty much just have to accept their methods and their languages because there is no other way we know how to look for "facts," and Heisenberg seems to be willing to do the same thing. But once we understand science in this way, I think it raises questions about the nature of our knowledge and even our perception.
Thoughts on poststructuralism
Given that our "ending point" today was about the result of poststructuralism, I figured that this presents an excellent opportunity to make a blog post.
I think that the result of poststructuralism- if it could be called one- is precisely that there is no result. If structuralism outlines very clearly the limits of a textual interpretation and end of a text, poststructuralism would seem to challenge those limits and that there even is an end. If everything can be read as a text, then any sort of "poststructuralist result" could also be interpreted as a text. Why, then, would the end of a poststructuralist project- since it rejects finite interpretations- BE an end in our conventional conception of it? It just seems to me that the goals of poststructuralism preclude any definitive end. This would be especially true for Derrida, but I don't know so much about other poststructuralist-termed authors.
I think that the result of poststructuralism- if it could be called one- is precisely that there is no result. If structuralism outlines very clearly the limits of a textual interpretation and end of a text, poststructuralism would seem to challenge those limits and that there even is an end. If everything can be read as a text, then any sort of "poststructuralist result" could also be interpreted as a text. Why, then, would the end of a poststructuralist project- since it rejects finite interpretations- BE an end in our conventional conception of it? It just seems to me that the goals of poststructuralism preclude any definitive end. This would be especially true for Derrida, but I don't know so much about other poststructuralist-termed authors.
Monday, March 1, 2010
isms.
Well at the end of class today relativism and nihilism were mentioned as things of which deconstructionists are sometimes guilty...
...and, deconstruction is reminding me a lot of phenomenalism (or what I remember as phenomenalism from Theory of Knowledge class in eleventh grade--that would be: the theory that includes the idea that one cannot be sure of the existence of anything unless there is evidence in front of him currently.)
Train of thought?: For a phenomenalist, it is impossible to know if something is "there" (if it still exists) unless it is actually there, physically present. So, if you were to leave a chair in the middle of the room and then leave the room, shut the door and walk away, you would have no way of knowing if that chair is actually still there and at rest in the middle of the room. Even if you turn around and open the door and see the chair, yes at that moment the chair is there, but you still can't know what it was "doing" for any of the time when you were looking away.
So back to deconstruction. Take a look at the linguistic turn: everything is a text, and nothing can be known about anything except what is written down/put into language about it. What is written down, or what is put into language, is the only available evidence. My thoughts are not available for you to interpret. Only the words I choose to express my thoughts with are available to you.
Language is the only thing that's there.
...and, deconstruction is reminding me a lot of phenomenalism (or what I remember as phenomenalism from Theory of Knowledge class in eleventh grade--that would be: the theory that includes the idea that one cannot be sure of the existence of anything unless there is evidence in front of him currently.)
Train of thought?: For a phenomenalist, it is impossible to know if something is "there" (if it still exists) unless it is actually there, physically present. So, if you were to leave a chair in the middle of the room and then leave the room, shut the door and walk away, you would have no way of knowing if that chair is actually still there and at rest in the middle of the room. Even if you turn around and open the door and see the chair, yes at that moment the chair is there, but you still can't know what it was "doing" for any of the time when you were looking away.
So back to deconstruction. Take a look at the linguistic turn: everything is a text, and nothing can be known about anything except what is written down/put into language about it. What is written down, or what is put into language, is the only available evidence. My thoughts are not available for you to interpret. Only the words I choose to express my thoughts with are available to you.
Language is the only thing that's there.
Some of the Problems with Barthes
So, I think I get what the Barthes essay is saying: that criticism has removed the author from any immediate presence in the text, especially in conjunction with the realization on the part of both reader and author that the narrative voice is entirely distinct from the authorial voice. This is certainly an interesting aspect of the modern literature and criticism, but I think Barthes must be contradicting himself when he says that this is the death of the author. (I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt, and imagine that he is taking a good deal of poetic license, but even if the death of the author isn't exactly what he means, I still take issue with his assessment that the author is no longer present within the text.)
What I mean is this: Barthes asserts that "at all its levels the author is absent" within the modern text, and further that the modern text is no longer a piece of polished craftsmanship, but that the work "has no other origin than language itself" (1468). What I can't seem to get my head around is his simultaneous and contradictory assertion that the modern text has become something "performative" (1468). He equates the text with "the I declare of royalty, or the I sing of the very ancient poets" (1468). The effect of such a performative statement is precisely a reminder that the performer is present in the first place!
I agree with Barthes that the nature of the author's position has been radically transformed, but I simply don't understand how he can argue that it is excluded from the text altogether; even his essay, which is invested in removing the presence of the author from the text, references the author as if he is still present. The transformation of the author from a dedicated craftsman to an almost improvisational channeler of language itself is notable, but it does not remove the author from the text. Rather, the author's position is transferred from one position of authority to another, equally as potent. The ancient poet, reciting epic poetry in a continuous, almost unconscious stream is nevertheless the listener's center of attention and direct mediator to the story he is channeling. Even the "performative" language preceding a recitation serves to draw attention to the performer. An audience focuses on the performances in a stage play; although an actor is simply reciting the words laid out by the playwright, it is through the actor that the audience experiences the story, and each actor has the job of interpreting that story.
In summation, I think the transition from author as creator to author as performer is a fascinating and useful observation, but I also think that the author's presence in a text is not removed by that transition.
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