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/
Class blog for Modern Literary Theory taught by Grant Matthew Jenkins at the University of Tulsa.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
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.