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.