Ideas for my paper

I have some questions that I'm working through right now. I have a couple research questions and hopefully I can narrow it down to one or synthesize them all in one encompassing question. I'm going to examine 2 short stories by Guy de Maupassant: "Qui Sait?" (Who Knows?) and "La Chevelure" (A Tress of Hair).

I based the questions on the ones that Foucault says should be asked at the end of "What is an author?" Here they are in no particular order:

• which ideological apparatuses are present, how do they influence the protagonist, and which ideologies do the protagonists operate under?
• given the central role that objects play in both of the stories, which commodities are fetishized and what are their functions within the ideologies present? What effect do they produce on the protagonists?
• Can the protagonists' discourse be appropriated by a bourgeois or an anti-bourgeois?

Some theorists that I may or may not use for the paper: Benjamin, Marx, and Williams. 

Oh Spivak, I like you. I really do. I just don't love you...

I had to read Spivak twice - and I only figured things out the second time around by looking up tons of concepts that she mentions. Not having the notes for this reading has been a real hurdle. To make my presentation concise enough to take up only 5-10 minutes, I'm going to retrace her idea of complicity between the subject and object of investigation. How I'm going to put this in summarizing terms, I have no idea. But for my blog I'll talk about something else. . .

What I think is very interesting about her study is that she brings to light the complicity of the male subaltern and the historian in placing the female in the margins of civil society. She says they ignore the discontinuity of the woman as the instrument of the continuity of community or history; yet she goes on to say that "the making-visible of the figure of a woman is perhaps not a task that the group should fairly be asked to perform." She says this is the job for a feminist reader, herself. Following this, then, why would she state that "it should be surprising to encounter such indifference to the subjectivity, not to mention the indispensable presence, of the woman as crucial instrument"? What "should be" surprising about the omission of a figure that they should not be fairly asked to make visible?

It's a miracle - I blogged before midnight!

I really enjoyed the two Foucault readings. To me, the most provocative and insightful was “The Repressive Hypothesis” which definitely put me out of my comfort zone a bit but I kinda liked that. His explanation of the evolution of the discourse of sex was very clear and intuitive, and the residual influence of religious ideology on sexual discourse today is very obvious.

I have studied the concept of bio-power in France but I focused on how it affected mothers – the implications to their social roles and gender roles, and the institution of ‘puericulture’.  Foucault mentions several times that France began to look at marital intercourse as a tool of economic power and how the regulations of the relations shaped certain conceptions of sexuality. However, women are noticeably absent from this essay. The majority of these matrimonial responsibilities fell upon the women who were regarded as the moral and cultural transmitters of France. Given the Christian ideal mother, the completely desexualized Virgin Mary, the woman was supposed to obtain motherhood without being sullied by sexuality. Foucault mentions that “the severity of the codes relating to sexual offenses diminished considerably in the nineteenth century” but what he does not mention is that the repressed sexuality of women was not alleviated. In the early 20^th century, WWI intensified expectations of the traditional wife and mother, obedient, pure, and fertile. France rewarded families monetarily for having more children, they created the medaille de la famille to women who had given birth to many healthy children, and even created Mother’s Day. Even more pressure was placed on the woman to embody and enforce the principles of the state. So while the ‘peripheral sexualities’ faced less punishment, women faced tougher scrutiny.

Regarding the sexuality of children, I believe that the sexual activities of young girls were of much more consequence than young boys, given this female purity principle, but Foucault doesn’t mention any difference between young girls and boys. He also walks a thin line in making statements like “these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children” and “the children wise beyond their years.” In the first statement, he qualifies pleasures with barely furtive, and adults with simple-minded. Saying an adult is simple-minded minimizes his involvement in the act, and, in my opinion, further enforces the discourse that pedophiles have some kind of mental shortcoming. Furthermore, paired with the alert child, the constructed imbalance in mental lucidity makes it seem like the child is the dominating party. While I don’t doubt that this has happened, Foucault does not convince me at all that this is the predominant case.

            The second statement is problematic for me also, since the fact that they are wise beyond their years implies a certain maturity that may or may not be the case. What is the test for this? I don’t necessarily agree that at a certain age the child is definitively able to engage in consensual sex. 18 seems like a very arbitrary number, and there are certainly cases that fall above and below that limit, however I fully believe that children are more susceptible to enticement; and most often their decision is not based on the knowledge of the consequences of their action, or they misjudge the authentic consequences.

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery", right?

I'm really glad that "Is Gender Burning?" was paired contrapuntally with "Is Paris Burning?" because after reading Bell-Hooks' criticism first, I thought her criticism was off the mark.

Impersonation has long been incorporated in cultural celebrations, such as Mardi Gras, and even crossdressing in Carnaval. On the one hand, in Mardi Gras, the general population mocked the ruling class by dressing up as them in a comical way as a one day act of subversion. In this manner, the impersonation of a minority as the ruling class, capitalistic white female could be interpreted as a form of mockery of this very figure. Or in another sense, some Native American cultures (name) crossed-dressed as deities and were venerated for having the ability to see into the worlds of both genders. Perhaps the phenomenon of drag can be interpreted as the inability to reconcile the many moving parts of the identities of these gay black men. On the one hand they are male, but identify with some qualities that are deemed as female. During the years of identity formation, it is probably that they were influenced by the divas of popular culture. Maybe this isn’t an attempt to achieve a certain sex and race ideal, but the mixing of different modes of identification.

Furthermore, Bell-Hooks discusses the film as if it was portrayed to be an all-encompassing view of the minority drag queen population, when in fact, the movie only follows a small portion. Bell-Hooks claims that the ideal is focused on the ruling class white femininity but she over-simplifies the phenomenon of drag by not accounting for the different kinds of, such as high camp, low camp, and glamorous. 

“To say as Livingston does, ‘I certainly don’t have the final word on the gay black experience. I’d love for a black director to have made this film’… implicitly suggests that there would be no difference between her work and that of a black director.” Maybe I don’t see this implication in her statement since I’m the outside reader ‘in denial’ of the way this exteriority informs my perspective and standpoint. I resent this hostility to “crossing-over”, which contributes to alienation and intolerance on both sides, whether it is gender, race, language, nationality, etc. It marginalizes both sides by forcing a population to stay in it’s own realm that was predetermined for the individual. It’s this very attitude that creates the taboo of cross-dressing, “Don’t pretend to be a woman when you’re really a man!”

I hereby make this a folk-theory

“Rather, we have tried to show the logic and structure that unconsciously lies behind the reality the speaker takes for granted.” The logic that the speaker takes for granted is not primarily based on his anger and consequent need for retribution. Rather, it comes from the historical and perpetual objectification of women, which has had the side effect of giving men a sense of entitlement to be the master of that object. Let me explain.

I’ll start with the speaker’s assumption based on the “folk theory” that “SEXUAL ACTION AGAINST SOMEONE’S WILL IS UNACCEPTABLE.” I’m not exactly sure what constitutes a folk-theory based on the wide variety of examples provided in this text, but this is a law, not so much a folk-theory. It is the law that makes it unacceptable, but Lakoff links this to morality, skewing the fundamentals of morality. What is immoral is to do harm unto another person, yet this folk-theory never comes up. He thinks it’s wrong to express his human sexual emotions to this woman who does not want him, not because he thinks it’s wrong to harm her, but because it’s socially unacceptable. He is not looking at this from a level of humanity – respect between human beings – he is looking at it as something that would make him look bad. Boohoo.

Also, notice here that he calls lust a  “human emotion” when Lakoff is making the argument that we express lust as a form of animality. We also say that we need to “pee like a racehorse”, yet even though we also feel this animal need to urinate and defecate, most humans over the age of 5 are able control their bodily urges to conform to social customs. I’ve never heard of someone feeling like they need retribution because someone made them hold it.

Lakoff explains his desire for retribution because he was made “LESS THAN HUMAN” and another “folk theory” (although I think this one is just a tad bit more legit) explains that “TO BE MADE LESS THAN HUMAN IS TO BE INJURED.”  Since the speaker does not treat the woman as an equal human being, with all the emotions that he also possesses, he is degrading her and not even realizing it, just as she doesn’t understand why this creep thinks she put on a v-neck just for him to see. He feels like this flaunting of feminine vibes is aimed at him, which means that he presupposes a right to it. The denial of this entitlement is what causes him to be angry. He is deprived of “power”, not humanity; therefore rape is about POWER, not lust.

Furthermore, this rationale does not account for the fact that 15% of rape victims are under the age of 12, and that 91% of rape victims are women, and 99% of offenders are men. If dehumanization and the subsequent need for retribution is the cause for rape, it would be expected that male victims would represent a more significant percentage of the total victims and that the gender of the offenders would be on equal grounds (because women are human…right?). I’m not sure how Lackoff would justify this – either that women do not lust and therefore do not feel the need to rape, or that women don’t get angry and therefore don’t seek out retribution. Either of these responses would imply that women don’t experience emotions like men do, which would completely invalidate his argument that these are “human emotions” since then they would be “male emotions.”

There’s oh so much more to say, but seriously, I’m disappointed with Jackoff. He had a solid paper until the last 6 pages discredited him. After constructing a prototypical model of anger, he uses it to justify rape. For his assumptions, he picks out “folk theories” that fit whatever he wants to say. He uses as evidence the arguments that convenience him and disregards the others – he refutes the claim of “many experts”, “that rape has nothing to do with sex or even lust, but is simply violence against women with no sexual impact, “ yet uses as supporting evidence a claim of some number of women on juries that some rape victims were “asking for it” (like their clothes are speaking for them). I think a different social issue would have been much more appropriate for the credibility of his argument.

And the award for Best Blog goes to...

It was befitting to read the Benjamin text on the night of the Academy Awards – the epitome of the entertainment industry’s artifice with its “beauty contests.” This award show, one of the most widely broadcasted televised events, also demonstrates Benjamin’s concept that “Film makes test performances capable of being exhibited, by turning that ability itself into a test.” So the award show itself is the exhibition of the test that judges the exhibition of the primary test.

The here and now of the Academy Awards illustrates William’s concept of industry as a ‘self-subservient world’. Even though the film industry is largely dependent on the capital of which the general public as the audience is the source, the general public has no influence on the outcome of the show. Even the live audience is replaced with movie stars so that the film industry fulfills both sides of the performance. The multiplicity of these award shows reinforces their artifice. Among the shows, there are several “Best Films” and “Best Actors” thereby negating the uniqueness of this value.

In the time of Benjamin, I can fully comprehend his belief of the film industry enforcing fascism, and today’s industry can certainly have this same ability. However, the revolution of technology has made the capacity of film making so pervasive that phenomena such as YouTube actually perpetuate ‘group existence’ instead of ‘mass existence’. Certain videos are only seen by a small minority of a minority, making the film much more unique in that respect. Also, at this point in filmmaking, I think it’s safe to say that filmmaking is a tradition in our culture so films are now embedded in this culture, giving it value. As an art form, I believe it deserves more respect than Benjamin gives it. Of course there are countless movies that aren’t anything of substance but I think that serves to highlight the merit of the few and true.

    

Plato's Pharmacy

Since I'm presenting on this text tomorrow, I'll spare you all the repetition of what I'm going to speak about and I'll just talk about some points that I found to be interesting.

• Speaking of the difficulty of translation, I thought this essay could've been translated in a much clearer manner. Also, a lot of it was lost in keeping the Greek - such as the play with the word eidos. I think a small glossary would be appropriate here.
• "Let us freeze the scene and the characters." This could only be done with writing, not with speech. To writing's advantage, it allows for a closer look and more time to analyze.
• "The father is always suspicious and watchful toward writing." This is evidenced in patriarchal institutions like the government and the church who have historically been involved with censorship and banning books. 
• "He has no need to write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices." Damn, I want to be a king.
• It is curious to me that Derrida never mentions the reader in his essay. I'll throw out some of my educated guesses in the presentation tomorrow.
• "If it were purely external, writing would leave the intimacy or integrity of the psychic memory untouched." I agree with Derrida on the preposterousness of Plato's cut and dry oppositions. And while I recognize the harmful effects on truth/memory that Plato attributes to writing, I don't see anywhere where Plato says these effects cause permanent damage. It merely causes it to be put to sleep, forgotten which I don't believe implies destruction. Consistent reproduction and repetition can cause the original message to be denatured (the Telephone game is a perfect example), but this doesn't change the original meaning in any way.

Give me liberty and give me death

"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." I very much agree with this quote and the argument that preceded it, but I'd like to take it a step further. I believe that the death of the author and the subsequent birth of the reader entails also a sort of resurrection of the writer with a new creative license (zombie Balzac?).  This liberty comes from the abolition the past trend where "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it," so that an author can broach new literary subjects without fearing a reactionary witch hunt resulting from personal association - be it for violating social taboos, breaking laws, including characters who have a vague resemblance to living public figures, or a character that too closely resembles their own Mama (this instance would probably incur the most painful outcome). I believe this freedom to develop different personas and experiment within them, if fully attained across the board, could be an enlightening event for the Greater Literary Field. This way I don't have to wait till my crazy Mama dies before I write about her (that was not me talking, Mom - there is no "author" here).

The ultimate attainment, according to Barthes is "to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'." In this explanation, I recall actors and their role in enunciation, which I believe is the perfect example of this ideal of performance since their personal identities (well, the vast majority anyway) are not taken into account as the spectator interprets their characters or the greater work as a whole. Furthermore, their on-screen personas don't follow them into reality (again, this is in general - I can't look at Michael Richards without thinking about Kramer). Even after watching American Psycho, and after he went psycho, I had no difficulty in believing him to be the valiant Dark Knight. 

One of Barthes' arguments, however, doesn't really ring clear for me: "A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology." The social factor of language is not a new idea (although thanks to Saussure, I've been reminded almost 10 times in 10 small pages) so it would follow then that a reader's interpretation of language would be intrinsically related to their history with the language - and in history I include biography and psychology too. The mental image that is summoned by language is unique to the reader and has already been formed in the past and stocked in their 'dictionary', and this signifier won't change significantly when the signified is encountered again in a different context (I think I am recalling Lacan correctly).

In fact, even if it was somehow possible to extricate the personal self (reader) from the reading, it is my humble opinion that the reader should be encouraged to bring their own personality to the work. I believe this would even further open the text and break down the limits imposed on a work, which for Barthes can occur with the death of the author. If the author dies for the sake that his reader and book can live, I believe that these two latter should be able to live in multiple states, in multiple personalities, in multiple histories. They shouldn't need to exist like zombies: living but with dead souls, always on the search for a brain to revive their humanity.  

I really like the other Barthes articles and had intended to talk about them here but at this point I feel like a zombie.  

Imagine... that's all we can do

I read the Communist Manifesto in 10th grade and it's definitely interesting to experience a different reading 10 years later.

The opening arguments were very powerful and provoking to me: due to Europe's tendency to cry 'Communist!' when faced with any kind of opposition, the Communist party is already affirmed as a power because it is a threat. I wonder when and where this 'fear' began. Was it immediately with the fall of feudalism? or was it at the onset of Modern Industry?

As for the work as a whole, I feel it's very idealistic, which I know is not an original criticism, especially given the historical outcomes of its attempted implementation. It's kinda like the first date I went on with this Canadian guy when after some drinks he confesses his dream of a world without money - so naive that I didn't even find it cute. Don't get me wrong, I'm not all about Capitalism - I don't believe that any pure system works. Hybridity is the way of future relevancy becacuse it gives systems the necessary flexibility adapt and develop in an ever-changing world.

Even though I have some prior knowledge of this theory, I have never used it in my literary analysis. Even though, Marx talks a lot about exploitation slavery, which are pertinent to my field of postcolonial Caribbean and West African literature, I feel like many of his claims are too extreme. They are like the Negritude of postcolonial African and Caribbean because in denying or demolishing the Other, you are intrinsically destroying a part of yourself, which, for better or for worse, has historically shaped your identity. Since Negritude, other theories have been proposed, such as Antillanite, in which, the realities of the past are recognized but not revenged.

Lacan is pretty hard to resist (in fact, according to him, impossible to resist)

After reading the chapter on Lacan (and consequently on Freud), I have mixed feelings because I saw the immediate relevance of certain ideas that would fit very well into my discipline, postcolonial francophone literature from the Caribbean and West Africa (mostly female authors), yet I believe that some of his arguments undermined some of the key issues in the literature.

 One thing I really liked was Lacan's explanation of the effects of trauma on the subject, as well as the representation in the unconscious and the coinciding appearance of symptom and resolution. This is very pertinent to the discussion of "la folie antillaise" and the general neurosis often experienced by a colonized population. These concepts would be very pertinent to the study of the postcolonial (and post-slavery) condition.

However, I find his description of resistance oversimplified and problematic as he relates acts of resistance to the ego, which he claims "operates solely with a view to covering the displacement constituted by the subject." This logic would leave the marginalized without defense to abuse and degradation - without any agency in the actual conflict, as if there is no way of preventing further psychological harm, just a way of curing it later (sounds like a lucrative situation for a psychoanalyst, just saying). And understanding the fragility of the human psyche, I find it extremely hard to believe that deeper mechanisms of defense are not present. I also find the relation to animal instinct problematic in the sense that, at least how it seems to me, he believes humans are above animal behavior, but I digress...

Much of the literature from this region deals with the trauma of slavery and colonialism and very often "the escape" from this imposed society of denigration towards lesser races appears to take place in the imagination of a number of the female characters. The other states of consciousness in which these women would seek refuge from time to time served as a temporary reprieve and nourished the hope for the eventuality of a different world. Lacan's discourse about the imaginary nature of resistance as a sign of futility just isn't evidenced in the actual experiences of these women.

Anyway, that's a good bit for now. Excited to discuss in class :)

I've had better

The "Art as Technique" article by Viktor Shklovsky was uninspiring in my opinion, although to be fair, the only 'familiarity' I have with Tolstoy's work is the 5 minutes I watched of War and Peace before my grandparents fell asleep and I could switch movies.

I believe that over time due to habitual perception (and due to our own limited mental schema to which we compare new concepts/perceptions), we start to perceive what we expect to see. I did like Shlovsky's idea of lazy perspectives - totally true. Kinda reminds me of the new digital scent technology. We don't even have to take the time to imagine what it would smell like! I can't wait for an Axe men's body spray commercial!

What was surprising to me is that Shklovsky talks for 5 pages about "defamiliarization" without ever mentioning that this technique is basically like having a child narrator or one that is completely ignorant of the cultural context. The narrations are very matter-of-fact, vague, and make the object seem pointless, which something like opera would be to some 7 year old who never knew such a thing existed. This naive point of view highlights the arbitrariness of cultural, spiritual, and societal phenomenon (I guess societal would just cover it all) and the tinge of innocence that comes along with it is just enough so that the moderate reader will not be offended. I wish I had known of the "defamiliarization" buzz word last semester...

A tidbit of ancient wisdom for us, "According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign" (21). Then he goes on to list all the borrowed language. This foreign "poetic language" is a lot like exoticism. Old news.

It seemed the content of the last 2 pages appeared without context and were a bit of a snooze.

Random thought, if people are so stingy in using our perceptive senses, why do they go to great lengths to seek sensual (sense-ual) thrills?

The Little Cask

You gotta love Maupassant. This was an enjoyable read although certainly not his best. Plus, it made me think of Saturday night when I went out with the intention of only having a couple drinks.

Here are some items that encouraged me to think a little bit more (even at 3am on a Monday):

• Duality of Human Nature
• The deal started out innocent enough, and there wasn't any motivation of greed or hostility to begin with. The shift to deceit was foreshadowed by the fowls who dared to steal the potato peels from under her nose. This connection of human greed to animal behavior undermines the validity of humanity if civility is a mere facade over our innate animality. Kind of like Heart of Darkness style. Can anyone show true charity? Is there always an ulterior motive?

•  Good vs. Evil
• This is unoriginally similar to my first item but now I'm talking about it in a interpersonal context vs intrapersonal. I think that most readers would be inclined to take the side of Mother Magloire, saying she was just an old woman who was victimized by a greedy businessman. But perhaps she was the perpetrator of the downward spiral? Her automatic distrust of him brings up the issue of lack of confidence in relationships. She expected him, at the get-go, to take advantage of her, and by one-upping him in order to be the biggest beneficiary of the deal she becomes the one who is taking advantage of him. Instead of taking steps to protect herself from exploitation, she raises the stakes. Maybe she perceives what she is doing as right because she assumed that was what he was going to do to her.

• Mother Magloire doesn't want to take a deal unless she is the one making out, which necessitates a losing party.  This illustrates the perception of a fair deal as an illusion, an unattainable ideal between two people. And so who decides what is right and wrong? In society, it's the law and the character of the lawyer is there as an assurance that what she is doing is just. But the lawyer is an illusory impartial and untrustworthy character. His interpretation of the law is not guided by fairness, rather he is concerned with how to gain his client (therefore himself) the most money and he manipulates the standards (i.e., value of the house) and ethics (i.e., what she deserves) to attain his goal.  

• The Power of Suggestion
• Tying into the title of the story, "The Little Cask", the story proves that one small suggestion is really all it takes. Once the idea was implanted in her head, Mother Magloire ran away with it. Knowing the power of suggestion, Chicot went off thinking he had already won. The other small suggestions include the one from the lawyer about increasing her profit and the one from Chicot about the liquor. The small suggestions, however, are coupled with a great amount of disorientation that Mother Magloire experiences when she considers them which is proof of their powerful effect. 

Disclaimer - The views contained in this blog are not those of the author.  I think that people are always generous and good ;)

Intro

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