'I am the other face of you'

Hi guys, to my great embarrassment I seem to have misplaced my blog posting date paper. So I decided to just write about what I find most interesting and relevant to my choice of text, feminist theory. First, I’d like to mention Helene Cixous article, The Laugh of the Medusa. Cixous talk about writing as a fundamental feminist activity. She says “every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak” (1947). And this is true in Anais Nin’s case. She grew up introverted, unable to express herself freely in front of others, and she had difficult time at school adjusting. She eventually withdrew to homeschooling option. She took up diary as a way to “speak” and “reconcile” with herself and her past as well as construct her present and future. Cixous also mentions the act of speech as an act governed by phallus. She said women who speak are often bare in front of the crowd, and even when she speaks, she “draws her story into history.” This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s quote about how men will tell you the truth when given a mask. In women’s case, it seems that mask and reality is intertwined without having to “perform” or “masquerade”. Her idea about how women have become another women’s enemy under the “white continent” male dominated society’s way of viewing women is fascinating. She says, “we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss” (1951). In this sentence, I can see so many connections to Nin and her writing. Nin’s attempt to write out the actions and reflections of her psyche and actually getting herself psychoanalyzed in the process is in a way trying to defy these myths constructed by men. There are dangerous pits though. First would be Nin did not initially write the diary to publish it. And secondly, she is just one woman and she does not necessarily represent the entire female population and can say, ‘this is how women think!’ Although there are problems in accepting Cixous’ entire claim, I do believe that there are several interesting ideas that can be related back to Nin’s writing. Her writings were not meant for publication but since it is published, it is legitimately on the table for discussion. Whether it was meant for publication or not, I think that it is safe to say that Nin’s writing of her private thoughts and her private activities violated social norm at the time did contribute something to the women’s conception of “I”. Through Nin’s writing, women were able to realize that there is multiplicity in women just as there is multiplicity in men (like Walter Whitman’s poem) and the frame of women’s mind can be explored and it is not necessarily a “dark continent” as Dr. Freud would say. In terms of Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, one line really caught my attention and that is the last line of her essay. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (2220). This made me throw the question out for anyone to discuss: Is Nin a cyborg or a goddess?

James Creech vs. Barbara Johnson

I really enjoyed reading James Creech's "From Deconstruction" excerpt lambasting Barbara Johnson. It's not that I didn't take away anything constructive from Johnson's article; she lays out a solid and airtight argument regarding Claggart's character. But I agree with Creech when he says that she leaves no room for other interpretations.

One thing I think that Creech's article shows us is the different lenses and biases we all as readers and critics have. I recall that once Amanda pointed out the "Jemmy Legs" ejaculation excerpt, we tried to look for more homoeroticism. That's not to say that it isn't there in the text of Billy Budd! I just wish to point out what I understand Creech to be saying in his article; that if we come to a text with a certain expectation and the purpose to find that in the text, we are eliminating other potential venues of fruitful meaning and analysis. This vaguely reminds me of philosophical concept of 'synchronicity,' a Jungian term regarding the experience of two or more events that are unrelated but are seen to take place together in order to produce meaning. One example I'm familiar with is "The Dark Side of the Rainbow" where people sync up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album to the film version of The Wizard of Oz. The purpose of this is to see that the two mediums work together in tandem and the lyrics of the song often describe what is happening in the film. Some criticisms the Dark Side of the Rainbow has come across is that is the moments of synchronicity are overshadowed by the multiple and numerous instances where the music and film do not sync up and our brains discard information that does not fit with the pattern we have decided to see.

I'm not 100% well versed in Jungian theory, but if we take reading the text as an event and interpreting/analysing the text as a separate event, we can see how synchronicity can be applied to our studies. If we force a text into a certain argument or do not not consider the opposing side, then we fall into the fault of Barbara Johnson as Creech sees it; "Johnson acknowledged no other reason to read Melville's tale" (17). I'm primarily thinking of the ways academics sometimes do not consider that perhaps their argument is wrong, misinterpreted, or even other venues for meaning within the text.

Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault

Too often, I think, we forget that the theorists and critics that we read are real people in actuality (then again, we can talk about what it means to be "real", etc etc. I digress). One of my favorite bits of theoretical debate is what is known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate, where on Dutch television, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debated on what is human nature. As far as I understand it, this debate is well-known among scholars of Foucault and Chomsky, but I've never heard it mentioned in class (this one or my undergrad theory course).

This is only a brief excerpt of the full debate and perhaps the only widely available video of the debate.





One thing I find fascinating about this debate is that in the transcript, is that Foucault prefaces his entire argument and statements with "If you don't mind I will answer in French, because my English is so poor that I would be ashamed of answering in English." So his entire dialogue is in French while Chomsky replies in English. Yet, despite this difficulty in language, the two theorists seem to come to a mutual understanding somehow of what they are discussing.

The discourse that follows from this debate is well documented in The New Press' edition of "The Chomsky-Foucault Debate," as Chomsky and Foucault both wrote articles detailing the points on which they disagreed. Their discourse really continued past the televised debate and didn't end until Foucault's death.

I just wished to share this with the rest of my fellow theory classmates, in case you didn't know about it already. It's one of my favorite bits of theoretical discourse.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Cyborg Identity: So Much to Gain, but What is Lost?

From the vantage point of 2011 it's clear that Donna Haraway's ideas have seeped into the general public consciousness. Consider three of the most critically and popularly successful female music acts of 2010/11:

[Of course it begs the question: did Haraway foresee the commodification of the cyborg figure?]

But it's impossible not to ask: is this what Haraway had in mind when she wrote "The Cyborg Manifesto?" Declaring that "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" and that the figure of the cyborg represents is "a creature of the post-gender world," Haraway calls upon the cyborg as a model for feminism (or, more specifically, materialist feminism) in the late 20th century and beyond. Radically deconstructing the traditional Cartesian concept of the unified self, Haraway call the cyborg "a kind of disassembled and reassembled post-modern collective and personal self." What's immediately striking about Haraway's ideas is how freeing they immediately seem, how they seem to offer a great deal of individual agency--we can construct and reconstruct our identities as we best see fit!

And yet… despite agreeing with many of Haraway's ideas about the formation of identity and recognizing that identity is indeed a jumble of heterogeneous parts that each of us bricolage in various configurations as we best see fit, there's something intensely disquieting about Haraway's ideas that I admit I sense much more than I can put into words at this point. For one--and I recognize this is pretty much an inevitability anytime the word "manifesto" is invoked--I can't help but feel a bit skeptical of the extremely optimistic position "The Cyborg Manifesto" takes. Nowhere does Haraway consider for any length of time the potential downsides of taking on this kind of role, the great potential, but also the great risk that breaking down the boundaries and hierarchies between machine/human, animal/human, etc. entails. As she expresses it, it can only lead to positive things.

But even more than that, even though Haraway insists that "coalition" will indeed form via "affinity, not identity," I can't help but wonder if as much as creating new and (hopefully) more meaningful communities, there's also the risk of alienation, of creating identities so specialized and particular that what becomes lost is the potential for community, or more specifically communities large enough to resist and offer respite from the restricting forces of historical and cultural hegemony (something we're witnessing right this moment with the OWS Movement).

This all comes back in the end, I admit, with something I've been wresting with the last few weeks as we've taken on Butler, Gates and others--I've been completely haunted by the Angela Davis's words that concludes Thompson's essay on Anna Deavere Smith and I keep returning to it after everything we read on issues of identity and identity formation. Thinking of gender, race and sexuality as tropes, thinking of identity as something that can be "disassembled and reassembled:" I keep thinking that these theories are all fine and good, but how well do they or can they hold up when the rubber hits the road, when they slide off the page and enter the real world? That's why I responded to Davis's statement that while "we have to find different ways of coming together" (which itself echoes Haraway's sentiments), communities should serve as anchors and "rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move into other communities, to understand and learn" (137). Implicit, of course, is that in the midst of (necessary) exploration, there's always community--whatever that community might be--to return to. And that's just something I just don't see much of in the figure of the cyborg, itself evoking a sense of indestructible, impersonal individuality.

Stop Telling My Words What To Do

One thing I noticed in regards to Cixous' "The Laugh of Medusa" and Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" is the instruction in which the authorial voice poses on the reader. With Cixous, she says "I must write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man." The didactic nature of Cixous piece is apparent, obvious, and the purpose of the theory to take away of "écriture feminine" of "women's writing." But Cixous contradicts herself when she says that both men and women can produce écriture féminine. What is women's writing if not produced by a women? Doesn't the entirety of literary western canon fall into some sort of écriture féminine if you make a strong enough argument for it?

I recall in my undergraduate literary theory course one student had a big problem with the theory of écriture feminine because after a while, all the authors and works of literature we chose to definite as such were all written by men, similar to Cixous's examples in her "Laugh of Medusa." But to that, I argue there's something flawed in the premise that something written by a woman is inherently feminine, or that you can tell it was written by a women. We're essentializing the product of someone's imagination to correlate merely with their genitals. How would something written by a tranwoman or transman be perceived?

Essentialism is something Barbara Smith does as well; in that there is something that all critics need to have and be familiar with if they are to be "Black feminist critics." With Barbara Smith's "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism", she acknowledges the space that black women occupy in being ignored by "all segments of the literary world - whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian - do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist." Smith is responding to a view that the feminist movement represented the perspective of white, middle-class, heterosexual women, and that the civil rights movement was made of black men. But the major thing that struck me with her article the way it seemed to instruct how to be a "black feminist critic" : "Before suggesting how a Black feminist approach might be used to examine a specific work, I will outline some of the principles that I think a Black feminist critic could use" (2229). Despite the suggestive tone Smith frames her principles, I felt that Smith was saying this is how a Black feminist critic should be.

Why must theorists and critics tell women to do anything at all? Isn't this command just as bad as the men and people in power declaring their own will over that of women and female-bodied persons? It reminds me of Luce Irigaray's "This Sex Which is Not One" in which she says that in order for "woman's development" to take place, the "renunciation of heterosexual pleasure" must happen first. She acknowledges this stance as problematic and understands that even is all women were to "expand their autoeroticsms, [preserve] their homosexuality" that it still wouldn't solve all the problems that sexism and that elevation of the phallus seems to brine and that having a "matriarchy" does not solve the problems of a patriarchy. For if there is a matriarchy, there is still something being given elevated status over the other.

Exploring the Metaphors of Gilman Via Cixous

Even though more than eighty years marks the distance between Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I found Cixous’ description of the imprisoned/oppressed universal, yet individual, woman in a phallocentric culture (who writes…or, should write!...in order to declare her self), beneficial in articulating the metaphors implied by the wallpaper, the woman writer, and the woman behind the wallpaper in Gilman’s short story. In the story, as the woman writes, from the confinement of her attic room (a former nursery), with bars on the windows, and a gate in front of the door, she begins to see the yellow, irritating wallpaper differently, particularly at night, noticing the peculiarity of the “sub-pattern” from which the “formless sort of figure” (1533), eventually, a shape “like a woman” (1535), emerges. She initially wants to escape from this figure, but, ultimately, she sets her free and, essentially, becomes this woman (1540-1541). “ Cixous’ descriptive phrases, such as the woman who is “led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism” (1943). The woman has difficulty speaking her self—especially to her husband—and can only express her self through her secret writing – an occupation which her husband and his sister strongly disapprove of. Cixous talks about how women writers have been deemed “‘silly,’” and that writing in secret does not promote good writing (1943-44). Additionally, there were several descriptions of woman given by Cixous that specifically resonate with the woman and her alter ego who escapes from the wallpaper. Cixous writes “The little girls and their ‘ill-mannered’ bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes—there’s not end to it—for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock” (1944). Such a description accurately portrays the way we see the woman who writes internally seething in anger towards her husband’s consistent inability to hear her (to recognize her subjectivity/selfhood), matched with the way the woman in the wallpaper shakes the bars of her confinement: the outer layer of the wallpaper (which could arguably be read as phallocentric writing or control, see Gilman p. 1536). Another description given by Cixous of the women wandering “around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing” (1944), also directly links up with Gilman’s story and the yellow line on the wall that circles the room (1538). Again, Cixous counsels woman to “Break out of the circles; don’t remain within the psychoanalytic closure. Take a look around, then cut through!” (1958), which is exactly what happens in Gilman’s story. One last comparison (even though there are so many more), the “within” that Cixous talks about also seems to manifest in the woman in the wallpaper (Cixous 1953). The only thing that I am not sure matches up so well is the end result. Is liberation for the woman in the wallpaper a good thing, or a bad thing by the end of the story? Are the woman who writes and the woman who emerges combined into one, or does something else happen to the woman who writes? Is she punished for writing? For Cixous, writing is, without a doubt, a positive act: “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (1946), but I’m not so sure it’s a positive liberation for Gilman—there seems to be consequences.

Hegemonic Incorporation: Is There Ever a Way Out?

In the essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" Raymond Williams takes up the much misinterpreted Marxist idea of determinism and the effects such misunderstandings have in cultural studies. In particular, he makes the distinction about how it is not merely ideology which orients society toward particular practices and beliefs but a hegemony which "incorporates" people by somehow appearing to be "reciprocally confirming", despite the fact that these beliefs may be totally alienating. At first this idea seemed identical to Althusser's process of the subject's interpellation into the state, but I'm now thinking that it's not because where Althusser claims a person is "hailed" or called out to Williams is saying that hegemony confirms notions of identity that are already in place. I'm not sure what to make of this because I don't really see how this can happen without ideology. I can see an example of this kind of hegemonic confirmation in the ways conservative politicians who back big business and make stringent cuts to funding social welfare institutions are able to secure the votes of blue collar, low income people by manipulating notions of freedom and democracy to appeal a sense of patriotism; essentially they get people to vote against their own interests by subverting those same interests. Obviously, this is a discussion for another day but I feel like it encapsulates this idea of incorporation Williams is talking about

As far as this idea of "alternative" and "oppositional" lifestyle and the essay's ending notion of society being influenced by art and art being influenced by society is concerned I couldn't help but be reminded of Meryl Streep's epic and unassailable "ceruleon sweater" speech from the movie The Devil Wears Prada", and since the Benjamin article deals so muc with film I thought it even more relevant to share it:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7moay_the-devil-wears-prada-cerulean-swea_fun

Those last few lines of Streep's really illustrate the fluidity of the relationship between life and art and also the sort of trickle-down nature of hegemony which is somehow reciprocal:

"That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of stuff."

Anne Hathaway's character, for all of her opposition to fashion, is both implicated within and perhaps even a prodcut of the system she opposes-- an idea I find as fascinating as it is horrifying.