Feminism !

After reading Tonya Krouse’s essay that got posted on the main blog I’ve decided to try to tackle one of the questions she proposes at the end;

“Who can “do” feminist theory? Who can be a feminist? Why do you think so?

I think that this is really what feminist theory, and arguably most of the theories we’ve studied so far, boil down to; what good can they actually bring us. I think that anyone can “do” feminist theory as long as they’ve got some idea of what that actually means. Everyone in our class knows that there are many different forms of feminism in both theory and practice, and that some who consider themselves feminists are in strong disagreement and/or often downright upset with others who say the same. I hope that you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with first wave feminism here at Emmanuel, and if you do I hope they’re smart enough to keep their mouths shut. As far as arguing between dissecting the nature of the patriarchal heteronormative system that we live in and add women and stir approaches, there’s a whole lot of people who feel that adding women is good enough, that we can cause enough change to bring social equality within the system as it stands. Third wave feminists, the people who want more than adding women and stirring, claim that the very nature of the systems in place (social, economic, religious, etc.) today make it impossible for women to gain equality within the system. These feminists want to either make a whole new set of systems from scratch that doesn’t discriminate or marginalize women and/or reveal the problems of the system in place by studying then and revealing their true nature.

Now that we’ve established that it’s difficult to define exactly what a feminist is, it’s even hard to discern exactly what said feminists really do. What does it mean to “do” feminism? Does that mean study texts and the world around us with a feminism always in mind, or does it mean always including and hiring women simply because they’re women, or even letting women vote because they’re people too? If doing feminism is simply treating women with equal respect and dignity as men, than anyone who doesn’t identify themselves as a feminist is, at least in my book, a bad person. I honestly don’t think that everyone is capable of the kind of mindset it takes to attempt third wave feminist thinking; some people will always be too set in their ways, and many people are just stupid. Even so, everyone is capable of least trying to understand higher feminist philosophy, with obvious exceptions in mind (like how there’s nothing wrong with a 4 year old not getting it yet, provided that s/he does once s/he’s older and capable of doing so). I guess for some people, adding women and stirring is better than nothing, hopefully their hearts are in the right place even if their heads are still catching up.

Despite what people have been trying to tell me since long before I took this class, feminism is not over. Feminism won’t be “over” until there’s no such thing as discrimination against not only women, but all marginalized groups is every society in the world. I’m way to pessimistic about people, filthy and miserable as they are, to assume that this will ever happen. Feminism didn’t stop happening after the demonstrations and bra burnings of the 1970’s, its still alive and making progress today. With that in mind, one need only walk around Emmanuel campus and start asking questions (what is a feminist? Are you a feminist? Etc.) to realize that feminism has a lot of followers to win over and a lot of work to do.

ManTissa

Today I’m going to write about Mantissa. My favorite part of the book was in section two when Erato gains creative control of the story after Miles tried to humiliate her with his knowledge of literary theory;

“You can’t do this!”

Very slowly her head comes up.

“No Miles.”

“I’m in charge here.”

“Yes, Miles.”

“If you think anyone would believe this for a millionth of a second… I order you to replace that door.’ Her only answer is to recline against the pillows. ‘Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yes, Miles. I’m very stupid, but I have perfect hearing.”

“Then do what you’re told.”

Like I said in class, I found Mantissa to be a lot like that old Looney Tunes cartoon Duck Amuck in which Daffy Duck has conflicting interests with the author of the text. I also like it because in both the cartoon and Mantissaa the characters are self aware that they are in story. Anyways, this dialogue happens right after Miles Green finds that the door to his hospital room (which is the inside of his brain, which he arguable can’t leave anyways, but that’s a point for another post) missing because he took away the authority of the author function, which he had. As the author of his own text, he could create things like the ashtray and the purple bathrobe, but as soon as Miles and Erato seem to be on civil speaking terms, one of them messes up again. As soon as Miles manages to at least pretend to respect Erato, he starts going on about literary theories and how smart and smug he is. Erato sits patiently playing dumb as Miles digs his own grave, not realizing that the methodic rational way in which he explains his points doesn’t make up for the fact that the content of said points is undermining his ability to be in charge of his own story. Miles can’t go on about how traditional literary studies for over two thousand years are completely wrong and how the author and the text have no relation to one another anymore and that there isn’t even any point to writing serious fiction other than to prove how useless it is to even try without completely screwing himself over. He can’t have his cake and eat it too. Erato sits patiently as the power of the author is destroyed and the power of the reader is put into her hands, giving her the ability to remove Miles’ door, clothes, and self confidence.

I am presenting tomorrow on Mantissa with Max about Mantissa and feminism, and so far I have brought up one of those things. I feel that there is a ton of material through which one can do a feminist reading of Mantissa, and there is enough good evidence to prove that Mantissa is an anti-feminist text. A lot of what Max and I talked about focused around whether or not Erato existed outside of Miles Green, which as a muse/inspiration she of course does, but she is only the version of Erato to Miles, for Miles. At the end of the book when Erato returns to her shape as Dr. Delfie, it could be argued that this is the form that she takes when Miles is out of the picture, this is her true form, uncompromised by what Miles consciously wills her to be. On the other hand, Miles is still in the picture, he is merely unconscious, and perhaps this is the Dr. Delfie of his unconscious, affecting him in unknown unknowable Lacanian psychoanalytic ways. But now I’m talking about Lacan, not feminism. Oh well, I guess you’ll just have to come to class tomorrow to hear what I’ve got to say about that.

Removing the Kane from Citizen Kane

My essay is going to be a deconstructionist reading if Citizen Kane in which I consider the character Charles Foster Kane to be the “centre” of the text. Charles Kane, or the idea of Charles Kane, is never reached, nor is he/it reachable; he/it acts as a decentered center to the text. Because he (or at least any real knowledge about him) is unobtainable by means of the very structure of the narrative, interviews and personal accounts, neither the audience nor any of the film’s characters ever actually gain access to whatever the “real” Charles Kane is, therefore meaning in the text is unfixed and open to infinite interpretations.

Okay. Now that I got that out of the way, I can explain what that means. For anybody who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane yet, you should check it out. I am willing to lend my DVD to anyone who is interested for a small fee, because I need access to the text more than anyone else right now and I need the money. Unless there’s actually someone else in our class who is doing some kind of reading of Citizen Kane, in which I think we should talk or something. Any who, Kane is the story of a newspaper tycoon who’s rise and fall to power is told through the disjoined non-linear narratives of a bunch of people who knew him; his friends, his ex-wife, his ex-guardian, and his butler. The creative parts of the story come about through both Orson Well’s own cleverness, but primarily through the ways in which each recollection is affected by how they felt about Kane and what period of his life they remember him most for. The people who liked him (Bernstein) talk about the height of his youth, which happens to coincide with when he was a good person, the people who didn’t like him (his ex-wife Susan) tell when he was older, uglier, and reduced to nothing more than an oversized bully locked away in a playground of his own creation. The language, lighting, and images of each version of Kane are unique and crafted with a purpose; to convey Kane in very specific ways as he changes physically and emotionally.

I like Citizen Kane because its one of the first films I ever had explained to me by a film teacher the way that films are supposed to be explained by a film teacher; take the text apart piece by piece and examine each in relation to one another and the whole. Don’t just look at lighting and costumes, look at how they interact with each other, with the other elements of the film (camera movement, acting maybe), and most important of all, why are they the way they are. This was what intrigued me most, because my first few viewings of Kane were the first time I’d ever thought of film elements being executed for a reason, and the sum of those reasons could bring meaning. I know this may sound like really obvious stuff to most of you reading this, but to a 7^th grader who’s just figured out that you should have a character wear a long black coat and a shroud over his face not just because you think it looks cool, but because it conveys visual elements of a character that can be expanded on or detracted from. In short, the more thought you put into a film, the more your sound and vision work together and convey thought out meanings, the better your movie will be (hopefully). The beauty of Kane is the combination of these elements combined for reasons, and each of these reasons were decided upon by Wells meticulously.

The idea that Orson Well’s very specific meticulously crafted ideas of what Citizen Kane is supposed to be about, the reasons he made the film, can be completely torn apart by deconstructive criticism, and an infinite number of interpretations, an infinite number of reasons, seemed really cool to me. With that being said,

Orson Wells.

The Desert of The Real

Baudrillard

First of all, this is not post modernism

Puppets Post Modern

Any who, I’d like to start this post by saying that Ken Rufo’s essay has been the easiest smoothest thing I’ve read since the beginning of the semester. And while I know that theories are complex things, and that giving specific examples to illustrate such complex things tends to simplify (and therefore confuse) our understanding of the theory as a whole; I still appreciate specific examples every once and a while. It’s kind of how I learned in every class I’ve ever had until this one. Any who, I’m glad I’m posting this after our class on Tuesday and our discussion of post modernism in relation to the Matrix, because I started writing this Sunday night and I wasn’t really thinking about it. I’d always wanted to know what the book Neo pulls his virus or program or whatever out of was about, though I’d never bothered to simply look it up. Which doesn’t bother me that much, because if I’d wikipedia’d it years ago knowing nothing about literary theory I would have had no idea what was. I really liked how Baudrillard analyzed critical theories as simply “new systems of exchange” and that they are (allegedly) just inventing new ideas and claiming that they were discovered and that they’ve been there all along. While I have thought this more than once during our discussions of theories, I always thought it was kind of rude to bring it up like that, but knowing that such an approach is actually a pretty legitimate insight, I’m a little proud of myself. Or at least I was until I tried to figure out what simulacra were and I was once again thrown into a horrible cloud of confusion. As Rufo breaks it down

(1) Simulations stand in for reality [and simulations are NOT the same thing as representations, we went over that] (2) Simulations begin to hide the absence of reality, and (3) Simulations produce their own reality, according to Baudrillard’s beliefs. I think my favourite example of this from class, and it helps that today is Halloween, is Salem MA. Salem has become the third stage of these steps, a simulation without an original, a simulacra. Yes, it is true that people who were accused of being witches were killed in Salem a long time ago. However, the actually meaning behind Salem, the idea of what Salem is supposed to be, has become lost to the point where the simulation of Salem has actually become what we think of when we think of Salem. And don’t get confused because people go there in costume pretending to be other people, I don’t mean simulation like that. Also, if anyone else feels like using Salem as an example (I find it quite appropriate) in our group effort to understand what a simulacra really is, please comment on my post so we can all try to figure it out.

Also, I read Borges’ short story about the map, and it helped. A little.

Here's the Author! (jk)

“What is an Author”

I’d like to start by saying that Michael Foucault’s essay was hard to read. That’s why I wikipedia’d him and then looked up a reading guide for “What is an author,” and I still found him hard to read. Rather I should say that I found “it” hard; considering that according to Foucault there isn’t really an author anymore and the author function as traditionally understood is a thing of the past. He claims that, “Criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance- or death- of the author some time ago,” and that, “The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence.” Foucault goes on to say that even though it is well understood that the author is dead, we have not yet followed that logic to its ultimate end, which leads him to question what is meant by the author function, what exactly constitutes a text, several other very big questions. I think that Foucault is trying to get us to question why we put such an emphasis on the author, and how authorship is so important in legitimising literary texts, when we have examples over time of authorship loosing and gaining significance, therefore authorship as a value is not static and permanent. I found it interesting that Foucault noted how between the Middle Ages and now the value of having a cited author has completely reversed between literary and scientific/non-literary texts, and how knowing that that is true, then clearly the value of the author is derisible. His dissection of our societies emphasis on authorship goes even further as he breaks down the fact that there is no set “theory” as to define what is and is not a text and what consequences that has when trying to discern authorship. I believe that Foucault was basically trying to make the point that in our modern literary world, where literary theories have shaken the very foundation of literary studies and where the traditional concept of the author has been established to be dead, it does us no good to continue treating texts in a way in which authorship is still so highly regarded.

Foucault defines the author function to some degree as being, “Therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” In trying to define exactly what an author (and therefore what an author function) truly is, Foucault cites St. Jerome and his four qualifications for distinguishing authorship. I didn’t like these at all, as they seemed incredibly easy to twist into dangerous inaccuracy in the wrong hands. The first criteria claimed that if a text was considered to be attributed to an author, and it was considered by whoever gets to make these decisions, below the level of the author’s canon, it would not be credited to the creator. There are huge problems with this idea. First, what if it’s one of the author’s earliest pieces, or what if it was written in a low period of their life. What if they just had a bad poem day or something? Better yet, what if their work is brilliant and it was actually written by the author in question, and the critic simply didn’t like it and therefore chose not to acknowledge it. This criteria of author accreditation is so flawed and open to corruption that it opens the door for a very narrow view of literature. While St. Jerome’s fourth criteria, the idea that if the alleged author quotes people who wrote after s/he died then it’s not really by that author, only makes logical sense, his second and third are also up for debate. They basically say that if there is anything that the analyst doesn’t like or doesn’t conform to what they all ready think they know, they can disregard the text as not being by the author. This is unacceptable in a place, like, I don’t know, literary studies, where the ability to interpret a text in different ways is kind of important.

Also, I had a great deal of difficulty in trying to find a post in an academic blog that I could link to that in some way pertained to Foucault and the author function. However, I did find this funny misinterpretation of Foucault's work here at Too Funny in a blog that links to a group of Foucault based bloggers. Hope you enjoy!

A reflection on Post Structuralism

I know it's been a while since we talked about post structuralism, and I am still going to put up an "official" post for the week, but I find it necessary to post a link to this quality work starring myself, Spencer Hensel, and Max Pacheco. The themes in it are strongly based on post structuralism, and I am excited to hear your newly acquired ability to give it some post structuralism criticism. Ask them if they were in it, they'll probably say they weren't, but that's just too bad because they just plain are and you can't hide the truth forever. I hope yall comment.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mvZ9DMwGaeo

Freud and Psychoanalytic Theory

So far I’ve found psychoanalytic theory to be much easier to grasp than most of the subject matter we’ve gone over so far. Maybe that’s because it focuses around concepts that I’m already familiar with, or maybe it’s because I’m actually getting better at this whole thing, but in any case things seem pretty good. I don’t really want to write about Derrida because I don’t think I would do him justice, which is a polite way of saying that I still don’t get a lot of his material. What I am starting to get a foothold on is Lacanian and Freudian theory, wherein the subconscious and other psychological factors are given some well deserved face time. I really like the idea proposed by Lacan that because language is the only way we can talk about the subconscious and the effects of the subconscious affect our language to the degree that it is impossible to accurately analyse the subconscious. But I might be getting that wrong.

Assuming that we can never completely understand the unconscious, it being the nature of the unconscious to never be completely 100% clear, we can only try to measure its effects on the world. Today in class this reminded me of how post structuralism worked, knowing from the start that we can’t know everything but it’s still good to try and question, being aware that the tools by which we try to dissect the system are compromised by the system itself. This felt a little like a self-defeatist attitude, where one could easily argue that if you’ll never really get it, then why even try. I believe that only after being upfront and honest about the fact that we are always compromised in some way in trying to learn about an academic subject can we truly gain deep understanding of it. It may not be possible to fully understand the unconscious mind, but knowing that (and how) it affects our language and ultimately our attempts to dissect it, puts us in a position where we can learn as much as possible.

Structuralism

Structuralism

So today I’m going to talk about structuralism. I’ve decided to take a stab at the quote

"the bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary" (35)

from the list Dr. McGure put up on her blog. While trying to talk about structuralism having read the chapter about post structuralism proves to be a challenge (in that everything is now more confusing and complicated), I feel that this quote represents the most important part of structuralism by which post structuralism was born. It’s no big secret that signifiers and things that are signified have no direct correlation in language (except for words like buzz, but that’s not really the point and there’s only like a dozen of them anyways), but I like the fact that if you really sit down and think about it, the consequences of such can have radical implications as to the meaning of language. If structuralism argues that all meanings to words, or anything in a culture for that matter, are arbitrary, then no meaning is predetermined, and so all meanings can change in any way at any point for any reason. Now while this might not seem obvious to so many people is because it feels like meanings are fixed; the language that we speak is very similar to our parents’ and our children’s language will differ little from ours. As a matter of fact, those elements of language that do change rapidly and unpredictably (like slang and catch phrases) are considered to be of little value to that big scary thing we like to call the “Dominant Ideology”. If all meanings can change, then there is no fixed center of meaning, and there are infinite interpretations of almost any kind of text. Follow that logic to its end, and I believe that we get to that even bigger and scarier thing we’ve now started to call post structuralism.

I’m not going to pretend that I understand post structuralism yet, but while I was working on a video for a friend I came up with this little analogy. I like to think of structuralism as being like a radical hippie or something that challenges all of the conventions and predetermined notions of its elders in pursuit of ever expanding knowledge, understanding, and more ways of thinking. With that being said, post structuralism is kind of like structuralism’s free spirited child, except as soon as it was born it promptly turned around and strangled its mother to death, arguably taking many turbulent years for the last air to finally escape its poor open-minded lungs.

I know that doesn't actually explain anything about post structuralism, but I liked it. I even called my friend who's video I was working on, and he thought it was clever, so there you go.

Christopher Craig’s Super Marxist Essay!

Today after class I read Prof. Craig’s piece on Marxist theory . His piece started off by explaining examples of Marxism incorrectly interpreted, like the backwards logic of the McCarthy hearings and the placement of Marx’s Communist Manifesto in a trendy clothing store. Not being able to tell whether the store put the book on display as a sort of tongue-in-cheek joke, or as a symbol of capitalist triumph, he eventually deduced that it was actually there because the book was still a legitimate threat. And in a typical capitalist fashion, such threats are in a position where, “It commodifies them and mystifies their meaning, while also potentially taming the subversive behaviors that might result from them.” Craig goes on to explain how the Manifesto, as well as other cultural icons of communism like the image of Che Guevara, have been twisted by the evil that is capitalism to not only diffuse their original threat, but actually work for the benefit of capitalist endeavours. Craig goes even further to compare the Communist Manifesto to the stylish jeans it is next to by saying that the juxtaposition of these two images not only makes the jeans look more edgy and radical like the book, the book is almost self-destructively used to remove the idea of the actual plighted workers who no doubt made the jeans. I, on the other hand, would probably look at the display of trendy jeans with the Communist Manifesto and immediately think of it as ironic in that the retail store is clearly not practicing what it preaches (which brings up the question again of why is the book in the store in the first place?). In class today, when we first started talking about the article together, the idea of whether or not the advertising people who decided to put the book on display with the “edgy” jeans was brought up. According to Craig, who says in his essay, “For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ever-present ruling class ideology that exists in everything from the literature we read to displays in trendy clothing stores to the nightly news,” the answer is probably yes. But that may not be so; he may argue that the advertisers for the clothing store (who I would bet none of which had ever read the book nor will they even in the future) are subconsciously reinforcing the ideologies of the dominant class that they are a part of, maintaining their level of control even if they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing. It brings up a lot of questions as to the motives of people, specifically in relation to the creation and interpretation of texts. Craig also comments that, “American ruling class ideology continuously spins narratives that attempt to limit the working class’s ability to recognize and respond to its own subjugation,” which in my opinion, is true.

10 Tenants of Liberal Humanism

Having just posted my blog entry for the week on my thoughts and feelings on the Helena Echlin/ Tenured Radical articles as well as my two cents on Marxist Theory, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be writing about one of the ten tenants of liberal humanism. So here we go, sorry if this one's late,

The first thing that really caught my eye when I was reading the list in the Barry book was #4, the idea that, "Continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation." This is a terrible idea, but before we get to that, let's start at the beginning. First, this tenet starts off with "Human nature is essentially unchanging," which when you break it down doesn't actually work. Human nature is based on the idea that there is an essence to all people, than there is something deep down inside, at least part of which happens to be the same for everyone. Lots of people don't believe this is true, and there is no definitive evidence to prove its existence anyway.

Evolution has proven that the experience of any species changes over time, including the brain functioning of human beings. Humans 100,000 years from now will probably be very different than we are, and that human nature we don't really know much about will be different too, if it ever existed at all. And even if you don't believe that evolution is real, you can't deny that a primitive human just wasn't capable of the same thoughts and experiences that we are, because he/she was dumber than we are. And if you don't believe that cave men and fossils and science are real either, then I really don't know what to tell you.

Anyhow, the part of this tenet that really bothered me was the idea that the purpose of literature is to reinforce continuity over innovation. As I understand this, it means that texts are meant to recreate what is all ready in the world, and the texts that recreate reality the best are considered better texts. This means that the purpose of literature is to always keep the world the same, to maintain a status quo and never invent anything new and cool ever. If everyone believed in this kind of conservative mindset, we'd still be scribbling in the dirt with sticks because no one ever made the crazy innovation of paper. Literature has a seemingly infinite potential for innovation and creativity, and to leave that potential unused would be a horrible waste. Nobody cares about texts than make us think the same way we used to, we care about texts that opened our eyes to new ways of thinking. Creativity and innovation should be considered as important as recounting reality, arguably even considered higher. How are people ever supposed to make texts that make their audience think in new ways if they can't think in new ways themselves? Also, things written by uncreative people are boring.

Marxism and Helena Echlin (9-19-07)

For the last week or so I've been trying to iron out all the details about literary theories and how they work. Going over Marxist theory first is like a good start, as Marxist theory seems easier to wrap one’s head around. I do think of the historic and social contexts in which texts are written, but financial and/or economic factors that effect texts have always seemed to bear more weight than other factors. Through a Marxist lens, as I understand it, all texts can be thought of as either reinforcing or deviating from the capitalist system that texts are created in. All forms of literature and art are compromised by economics in some way, and no work of art is truly and completely separated from the bounds of money. I’m fascinated by the idea that all texts and other works of art are directly affected in both form and content by the economic situation of the society they are created in on a large scale. While I never agreed with the Marxist idea that all history is the history of class struggle, I think it’s a very interesting way of looking at the world.

Also, I'm still not sure what to make of the article written by Helena Echlin. While I agree with her opposition to literary critics who are so wrapped up in what they do that they may have lost the meaning of their work, specifically those who claim "I don't read literature for pleasure anymore, " there's still a lot in the article I disagree with. Her anti-intellectual attitude did in fact, after talking about the article in class, seem very out of place for a woman who's supposed to be getting her masters degree in English from Yale. Even though the article was published in a magazine, it reads more like an angry livejournal entry, picking at specific people and using petty examples instead of staying focused and proving a point in a well organized professional way. I don’t know if she was intending the work to feel informal and sub-professional, more accessible to non-academics, but if it was then I think she did a good job. No that there’s anything wrong with writing in the vernacular, especially when the nature of your argument goes against doing as such, but the article is definitely below the level of a professional scholar. The kind that goes to Yale.

The article by tenured radical, which arguably could be thought of as being on the same level as an angry livejournal, was a better read because it was more entertaining and more insightful. Also, as a philosophy minor, reading that philosophy professors and students can get away with using theories in an academic setting in which other fields of study can’t was nice.

Liberal Humanism (9-11-07)

I'm glad that we read about liberal humanism at the very beginning of our class, because I don't really like it and I don't want to deal with it again. I can see why English was at first taught as an academic subject through the "lens" of liberal humanism, but you can really only go so far with that mindset. Teaching English without applying any kinds of theories (though technically liberal humanism is in fact a theory in its own right) or taking into consideration historical context and knowledge of the author(s) is like purposefully blinding yourself from the full meaning of a text. There is so much a person can gain from looking at a text from many different perspectives; I'd like to think that that's kind of why we're here (at Emmanuel).