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.