'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.

Race Relations and Gender in American Politics

In light of our recent discussions on race relations and gender and the cringe-worthy sexual harassment debacle surrounding Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, I thought I'd share this NYT opinion piece I came across today. On another note somewhat pertaining to our discussion of gender last week, I think it's been really interesting to listen to the attacks that have been leveled against this fourth woman Sharon Bialich in an attempt to discredit her allegations. Honestly it's been shocking to realize that women in the workplace in 2011 are STILL going to potentially be cross-examined and looked at as suspicious for, say, going to dinner with a male superior. If you have time the piece is short so check it out!


http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/the-cain-scrutiny/?ref=opinion

Power and Identity, Gender and Performance

Judith Butler’s article The psychic life of power was the most interesting from this week’s reading. The article in a way summarized the nature of relationship between us and the external power that in turn shape us and make us “perform” certain aspects of ourselves. Butler mentions, “Power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (Butler, 3). I find this fascinating. As Tauva mentioned in her post, is there nothing natural in individual’s identity? This question goes all the way back to Lacan’s argument that we form our identity in relationship to others. The mirror image has a lot of truth in it. We look into the mirror and find the “other” in that image. And as we live our lives, we continuously find the “others” images to shape ourselves. Even the others’ image seeps into our language. In Korea, many of the middle school and high school demand that they wear uniform. This uniform is a lot like the Japanese uniforms and Korean society has taken this image of their school uniform as our norm. A lot of Japanese language and music had become one with Korean language as well after the colonization. The external power had been in some ways, “internalized.” I agree with Tauva’s question: is there anything natural about identity and how it’s formed? Is identity a form of collage and performance we adapt from the external powers? I was also blown away by the idea of gender as an imitation of representation. Performing drag does not necessarily mean that you are homosexual and I think this was very true. Then in terms of assuming this “other” role, who can really say what is the true nature of someone’s identity or gender or sexuality? I also found it very interesting that even in homosexuality versus heterosexuality that power relationship is played to sustain each other’s identity. Butler argues, “For a gay or lesbian identity position to sustain its appearance as coherent, heterosexuality must remain in that rejected and repudiated place. Paradoxically, its heterosexual remains must be sustained precisely through insisting on the seamless coherence of a specifically gay identity” (Butler, 149). The power and the subject intertwine and form this strange coexistence that creates each other’s existence and help sustain it. I see an endless circle of repetition. But in a way, a very fascinating repetition.

Renee Gladman and New Narrative

So, first some things to know about Gladman. She is firmly GenX, born in the early seventies. From the South, as in The, as in Atlanta. She went to Vassar (philosophy) and went to New College (poetics) (that school that doesn't exist anymore, which is sad) and now teaches at the one MFA program that I wanted to go to but knew I never had a chance (though, she wasn't there yet at the time): Brown. Oh, she is African American. And lesbian. Totally experimental. I know most of this because I already knew it because I am writer-in-love-with her. I know some of it because I have teachers who know her because she is definitely a fellow of the New Narrative school of writing. Specifically, Dodie Bellamy taught her at New School. Camille Roy included her in the anthology of essays about New Narrative, Biting the Error. I have worked with each of these writers a lot since as early as 2003 and 2005 was the first time I read Gladman.

What the hell is New Narrative? Well, that is complicated. But, generally, it is writing in a style related to or actually writing from a particular group of San Francisco prose/poets of the late seventies into the eighties. It is decisively queer in nature, if not literally so. It is always other. It need not be from that time period. The real defining characteristics is narrative attempting to undermine the typical hierarchical, controlling characteristics of narrative. That is, the New Narrative writer sees traditional narrative as of the system and definitionally oppression. It is too Anglo, too male, too straight, too Protestant, too law abiding, too linear, too English speaking, too logical, too "realist", too capitalistic, too consumerist, too detached, etc. All of these poses presents a false and alienating narrative moral stricture upon the reader. New Narrative tries to break that. Bunch of commies, socialists, Buddhist, anarchists (little 'a'), punks, etc. and et al.

How? Well, lots of ways, actually. Such an aesthetic purpose, it turns out, allows for a very wide range of style. Sort of makes sense: let us break up the system; there are many ways to break the system. Strategies can look like an unblinking "I" (Robert Gluck, Eileen Myles) or very personal and yet clinical language to tell almost rumor-like stories (Pamela Lu). It can include a consciousness picking away at itself and its memories and their validity (Kevin Killian, Lydia Davis). It can include the grotesque and the found in the middle of critique and sex (Bellamy). Extreme metaphor and almost inverse language poetry (Carla Harryman). Or, as with Gladman, the use of the sentence to impart mystery in sense of self, time, location, and others. Many more, sure. But you get the idea.

Here are some money quotes from various reviews of three of Gladman's works that I have chosen to concentrate on.

Juice, the first, was published in 2000. It was the first work by her I read. Loosely, it is about a woman, you do eventually get the sense of her gender, ethnicity and sexuality, searching. A lost city. A lost self. There is shifting, movement, myth and losing myths. Lovers and familial. I have always suspected, since before I knew anything about her or that she was from Atlanta, that it was about San Francisco and Atlanta (I grew up a bit there myself).

The Activist was published in 2003 by Krupskaya, on a year when Kevin Killian (Dodie Bellamy's husband) was an editor, so you see how this all is related. Loosely, it is about a journalist reporting on a group of activists. Only nothing is really certain. A bridge may, or may not, have been exploded. The group may or may not have demands. It is a critique of the war mongers of the state, but clearly of activists with no clear point too. And definitely, perhaps most bitingly, of the media use of passivity in attempting to communicate reality. As with Juice, the book is distinctly about a place, though the place is not named specifically and even in the world the maps of the place keep changing and the activists are unable to read where they are at. This parallels some shenanigans with street signs changing in Juice. Definitely, I felt the first time I read it, San Francisco. But then, she had moved. Maybe it is Boston or Providence?

Finally, The Event Factory is the first of a trilogy of sci fi books. I mean this loosely. It is about a linguist who travels to a city, Ravicka. Everyone is leaving. Though there are some coming and going. She has difficulty communicating directly even though she speaks the language. There is some revolutionary stuff again. And she has great difficulty finding the downtown. Everything is slippage.

"Gladman's text is ... made up of beginnings—of appearances—that do not develop in expected hierarchical or chronological ways, but instead open into the disappearances in which the text abounds. While Gladman's appearances and disappearances do not conform to normative codes or systemic modes of thought, such systems are often alluded to..."

"each of the prose poems that comprise Juice has at its center an inexplicable appearance of absence, disappearance, displacement—one that might encompass private as well as public, and internal as well as external, loss—whether of a culture, a community, a relationship, a period of memory, a sense of self."

Rust Morrison, epoetry.


"The Activist is almost too explicit for allegory. It is practically a direct metaphor for current circumstances in the United States, where the book is set. And yet, it explores ideas that go far beyond the current situation and are applicable to any case in which civil liberties are at issue and a government is trying desperately to support its own agenda at the expense of the truth. It peers insightfully into the activities of activists and discovers their strengths and shortcomings."

David Harris, Bookslut


"In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)"

"The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23)."

Paula Koneazy, Taurpaulen Sky


"Unlike the shattering of a planet, Event Factory presents a world simultaneously exploded, particulate, and intact. The novel's narrator, an expert linguist and tourist, deplanes in Ravicka a stranger, and despite weeks or months of interpersonal disjunctions and a vague, nearly-lethal survival exercise, grows no more integrated. She remains other, and though she occupies Ravicka and is known to Ravickians, the world they engender is out of her reach. Its meanings are too fluid to grasp. Even as she waits for understanding, waits for something definitive to happen, the city-state grows and changes."

"Not only does Gladman multiply possibilities by addition, she subtracts in a wildly generative way as well. When the narrator attempts to explain her experience with the agents in Ciut Centali, her escape, and her time with the city's other revolutionaries, she says, "I argued... that it was possible to tell a story without explicit details, that this was even the better approach. How else to get to what is hidden?" Though reminiscent of Ashbery's "The New Spirit"—"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way"—it seems Gladman's narrator is implying a particular detail, a particular event, a particular needle in a particular, and exponentially reproducing, haystack. Where Ashbery abandons the general glut of details in favor of lack's simplicity, Gladman's narrator is leaving out a very specific injury. More importantly, even if there is no such injury, the process of leaving-out so specifically even a nonexistent  entity engenders a specific field of absence. By breaking the world of Ravicka, the world of Event Factory, into told and untold, existent and non-existent, Gladman cultivates new and more fertile terrain in the interstices and overlaps."

"Whether or not, "the event of sleeping on the grass,"—a scene of loveless, mechanical sex—is the absent injury, it nevertheless forms the tonal fulcrum of the book. Prior to it, the narrator is a happy tourist, attempting relationships across the chasm of the Ravic tongue's gymnastic physicality. She visits buildings and talks to people, using the language, if somewhat imperfectly, as a tool. Afterwards, all such differences are conflated. People are buildings to be excavated or evacuated. People are parts of speech. She says, "The hotel became a sentence I struggled to complete. My friends there, adverbs. In Ravic, however, there are no adverbs." She becomes solitary, and her friendships dissolve."

Tom DeBeauchamp, The Collagist


"There is a pervasive sense of urgency among Ravickians yet none seem deeply bothered, just lonely and disconnected and constantly in motion."

Michael Davidson, The Open End

Is _____ a Trope?

As I was reading the final section (pp. 2551-2553) of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in our anthology, I was struck by the connection Butler’s idea concerning the performative nature of gender makes with Gates’ conception of the performative nature of race (which we talked about last week), so much so that I was wondering if particular sentences describing or defining gender in Butler’s text could still make sense if one swapped out the word “gender” for the word “race.” Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but is race not written on our bodies by culture/history in the same way that gender is (Butler 2543-2544)? This prompted me to consider whether or not all aspects of identity are performative (and if not all, then most, but then which elements of identity are “natural”?). This growing inquiry, which is not, obviously, fully developed in this blog entry, finds another foothold in Thompson’s article “Is Race a Trope?” (from which my title finds its source), when she explains how the theatrical work of actor Anna Deavere Smith performs diverse characterizations of not only race, but “ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions” (127). Is there nothing natural in individual identity? Are all of the various pieces of identity listed above not inherent in individuals, but indeed constructs of culture/history/society, and thus always changing as time marches on? Is nothing about identity fixed and concrete? Of course, it is all a matter of opinion in regards to which theories one prescribes to, but it is an interesting existentially phenomenological discussion.

Billy Budd re-write

I have been wanting to share this with you guys for awhile, but had trouble tracking down the files. Luckily, one of my collaborators still had a couple of the files. Forgive the backtracking.

So, back in 06, my first semester at Bama, I was in a yearlong novel workshop run by Kate Bernheimer (if you like fairytales, check out her Fairytale Review). The first semester, we did not write. Not exactly. We brainstormed, complained about writing and ourselves as writers, we wrote a little, read about the coming ecological apocalypse, and read and then re-wrote Billy Budd in teams of 6.

Our version ended up playing on how the themes refracted through a viewing of Blade Runner. Andy Farkas, one of our group mates, loves Philip K Dick.

I was thinking about this project in terms of textual history (how we decide what to do, who to write what and the algorithm for how to set things in motion) as well as the question of the author in terms of intent, language, etc. It is clear that is it all over the place because we each had our own agendas. Even though we all did brain dumps that semester so we could get to writing the hundred pages Kate demanded of us the next semester, and so never looked at this again, I recognized it immediately. My writing is decidedly different. Chapters 8, 9, 17, 18, 26 and 27. Though there are places where I clearly edited a bunch since we all took turns editing the whole thing as we progressed. It is especially interesting for me to see again because there are some things in there that would seem obvious to me now, but that I don't feel I had much intellectual critical thinking grounding for yet. My sarcastic condemnation of the corporation was clearly in the voice of me loving Melville, but also, dare I say, a wee bit Marxist. Weird for an avowed Marxists-are-silly person (at the time). I suspect these ideas came more from my phase of reading of 19th century mystery novels, combined with my involvement with New Narrative writers, and my intense interest in the prison industrial complex.

If you want to peak, it is wildly imperfect, but also short.

Billy Budd/Blade Runner redux draft

A Variation on Spivak's Silent Subaltern: Is there such a thing as the Post- Post Colonial?

All of this week’s readings are connected by the common theme of myth as it relates to and manifests in culture in order to achieve a particular end. Levi-Strauss asserts simply that myth “corresponds to a universal way of organizing daily experience” (819). We see this statement enacted in the “Just So Stories”, particularly in the account of how the camel got his hump, as the camel is literally saddled with a hump as punishment for his laziness. The structure of the story follows Srauss’s formula: We are presented with a question that addresses two opposites and aims at presenting the solution. The myth’s moral is one of utilitarian virtue which warns a hump will develop from boredom and a poor work ethic. Thus, myth provides a model for explaining contradiction and also is also that contains the beliefs of a society. While all of this is obvious and easily grasped, the most interesting part of Strauss’s article is how he says it is the repetition of and in myth which renders its structures apparent. And I think it is with this notion in mind that a segue into Said’s discussion of Orientalism and colonial discourse is most meaningful.

Said argues that “knowledge [or a lack thereof] of the Orient creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” and that colonialism is a self-affirming, self-fulfilling enterprise that is dependent on imagined binaries of superiority/inferiority, strength/weakness, etc which tautologically claim Western dominance over the East. His main gripes are that the Western understanding of the East lacks objectivity and instead favors a fixity whereby the colonized people are both historical and ahistorical, they (the Orientals) have a “history” of being weak that is supposedly permanent and unchanging. This is where Strauss’s repetition comes into play since the colonizing force is constantly having to remind itself of the reasons for colonization. Said emphasizes the paradoxical nature of colonial thought by showing how there is both a visibility and an invisibility inherent to it-- the power structures are able to be seen in Christian missionaries, schools, and government which propagate Western ideals, yet the ideology behind this propagation is veiled. In a nutshell, colonial rule is dependent on a fixity of the Other, out of which comes a stereotype of the Other as weak, stupid, and tons of other negative things in order to maintain power.

Said obliquely address the anxiety of the colonizer, especially when he quotes Kissenger, “Thus the duty of men in the Post-Newtonian (real) world is to construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity” (47). But overall he seems more concerned with addressing how the West uses its imagined narrative of the East to justify subordinating it.

In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discourse, and Colonial Power” , Homi Bhabha elaborates on this notion of the anxiety in the stereotype, indeed his whole corpus is concerned with probing the ambivalence of the relationship between colonizer and colonized in order to get beyond this Western “epistemic violence”, to borrow from Spivak, that Said talks about. What Bhabha means by ambivalence is that colonial discourse inheres in contradiction: the West colonizes in an effort to “civilize” but its methods of doing so are aggressive and racist. Bhabha says that the colonizer’s anxiety over this ambivalence is unconsciously apparent and he connects the sterotype to the fetish:

Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor

as substitution (making absence difference) and metonymy (which contiguously

registers teh perceived lack). The fetish of stereotype gives access to an identity

which is predicated as much on mastery as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a

form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and

disavowal of it (Location of Culture, 74-5).

Bhabha goes on to say this disavowal of difference in the stereotype is captured by Lacan’s Mirror Stage insofar as image is not identity. Said also touches on this briefly when he mentions something about the colonized subject never being able to see the colonizer age so as not disrupt the image of authority. Basically, Bhabha considers how colonial rule is born of stereotypes, myths, narratives of superiority, and the tension in this narrative which stems from an inherent contradiction and, further, how the potential for this tension to be turned into a resistance to Western hegemony.

As you may recall, I am working with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao for our assignments in this class, a text that is steeped in myth, hybridity, and the experience of diaspora. The passage that I’m going to have us look at tomorrow presents myth as the kind of resistance Bhabha mentions. Oscar Wao is the story of an overweight Dominican ghetto nerd who grew up in Jersey and can’t get a girl to save his life. Diaz appropriates all kinds of culture in the narrative--sci fi novels, comic books, classical literature, and Latin dictators to name a few. The kind of writing that Diaz does has been dubbed “post-post colonial” in that it articulates the second generation experience of colonialism, one that occurs in a Western, imperialist country. With all of the cultural borrowing that we see going on today would we be willing to say that there is such a thing as the post post colonial?

Derrida on Deconstruction

Hi guys, I know this isn't related to Psychoanalysis but I thought this was interesting to see.

Enjoy!!

Derrida on Deconstruction

Psychoanalysis and Anais Nin

When reading Freud and Lacan, I actually found a lot of their ideologies interesting despite their sexist views. Especially comparing it to the text I am studying Henry and June, I felt that psychoanalytic view on phallus is very important reoccurring themes. First, let me point out few things that stood out to me when reading Freud and Lacan. Their use of phallus as a symbol of desire was very interesting. Especially when Lacan mentions that, “The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire” (Norton, 1187), I found the interconnection between language and phallus very important. Lacan goes to argue that it is a signifier because it is the most “tangible” element in the real sexual copulation. This is interesting because in Anais Nin’s text, it is all about intangible emotions and feelings that are put into writing and sexual relationships between two or more individuals.

In Anais Nin’s case, this is very true. She tries to overcome the issue of father being absent originally by writing a diary which is where my text comes from. Nin’s writing motive evolves from a letter to her absent father to writing itself to discover herself and later to observe others. In the text, she constantly analyzes herself as well to gain the knowledge of herself and others. In a way, like Freud’s idea of unconsciousness taking shape and civilized, she does the similar process in her text.

In Lacan’s theory, the center is called the Other, the Phallus. He believed that the self is constructed through relationship with others. The child tries to find the meaning and purpose of one’s self through interacting with other people and leaning about their desire, their phallus. This is a very interesting idea to discover because what Anais Nin does is she tries to figure out her own desire through interacting with the others. She is focused on her pleasure, her desire, her needs but she isn’t so concerned with merging with others and necessarily becoming one with them.

This is one of the conversations between her and her doctor:

From my dreams he culls the consistent desire to be punished, humiliated, or abandoned. I dream of a cruel Hugo, of a fearful Eduardo, of an impotent John.

“This comes from a sense of guilt for having loved your father too much. Afterwards I am sure you loved your mother much more,”…

I feel oppressed, as if his questions were thrusts. I am in a terrible need of him. Yet analysis does not help. The pain of living is nothing compared to the pain of this minute analysis. (Pg 131).

I believe that in here, she shows her side of the resistance as a woman. The man’s analysis that is based on male dominated society does not suit her. And later she gives her own analysis on her behavior based on the idea Allendy gives her: “I take Hugo to the rue Blondel and incite him to infidelity to punish myself for my own infidelities. I glorify June to punish myself for having betrayed her” (pg 133).

I think these two are interesting parallels. She accepts the psychoanalysis and she does not deny the power and logic of it. However, at the same time, she does believe that with women, there is far more than just “penis envy” and there is something more rising out of it. The desire to be woman is something that Freud could never fully fathom. And in Anais’ text, she takes the readers on an emotionally complex journey. We get to take a view into a woman who wishes to live like a woman but not by the society’s standard. She chooses to be a woman of her own. And this woman of her own is what the readers must discover through her diary.

The Uncanny Fear of Bats in Batman Begins

The condition of fear – what causes us to be afraid and why – is a study that has continued to intrigue me since my junior year in college. What particularly interests me about Freud’s argument in The “Uncanny” is his suggestion that what an individual perceives as uncanny fear is rooted in a past (usually childhood) experience: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 825). Freud’s analysis of Jentsch’s analysis (and subsequently Freud’s reanalysis) of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken reminded me of the creation and foundation of Bruce Wayne’s fear in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins. Wayne’s fear of bats is also rooted in his childhood when he falls in a well and is engulfed by the bats. He, of course, is rescued by this father. For Wayne, this memory is intertwined with his profound love for his father. It will also be connected to his profound guilt for (as he perceives it) causing the murder of both his parents, since it is because of his fear of bats manifested the dramatic representation of them in an opera performance which causes his parents to take him out of the opera house and run smack dab into a mugger, who ends up shooting Wayne’s parents in front of him. As an adult, Wayne’s fear of bats is intertwined with his pervasive childhood memory of his parents and their murder; his love, guilt, and anger over what happened. The way in which Wayne then harnesses and utilizes his fear as a means of empowerment is also fascinating, but less in line to what Freud discusses in The “Uncanny.” Ultimately, however, I feel like Nolan’s film is an excellent modern demonstration of Freud’s analysis of the uncanny brand of fear and its source.

The Center and Billy Budd

While finishing the last few chapters of Billy Budd I couldn’t get this idea of the center being both within and outside of the structure. As I sat tallying up the different instances of Billy, Claggart, and Vere as center in the novel I was for some reason annoyingly repeating the first verse of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”. At first I thought this was mostly because of that line “the center cannot hold”, but then it occurred to me that the verse in its entirety really speaks to the kind of conflict and ensuing chiasmus that Barbara Johnson talks about in the chapter we read. Here’s the verse

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Initially I thought I would be able to make the case for Vere as the center since he adjudicates Billy’s assault on Claggart, however I see now that this would’ve been flawed since, as Johnson points out, Vere is making his judgement from inside a political and historical structure which Billy and Claggart do not occupy. Likewise, Vere doesn’t understand the structures, or maybe more precisely modes of being, that Billy and Claggart exist within. I’m interested in those last few sentences of Johnson’s, “It [the deadly space where eclipses in meaning occur] is that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing if whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (p.109). Is she not basically saying that there is no center? Because if there were then wouldn’t action always have to coincide with understanding since the center would be a kind of fail-proof metric for both what we know and how we act? She looks at all these different approaches to interpreting the novella, psychoanalytic, moral, religious, and according to her they all fall short. I feel, though, that her relentless introduction of all these oppositions, human being and doing, literality and irony, leave me with the same lack of understanding. Is that the point? That the more we interpret the less things are what they seem? That things (knowing, action, judgment) fall apart because, as Yeats proclaims, the center cannot hold?

Textual Criticism and its importance

I apologize for the late posting. I recently just acquired The Textual Condition by McGann at the local library so I decided to read a bit more about it and the book is so far fascinating. I find it very interesting that the idea itself can be limited by the textual condition of the material. As a writer, I am fascinated by this claim. He also mentions in the introduction, "...as the reader's pursuit of a meaning or closure in perpetual retreat beyond the horizon of the reader's vision" (McGann, 5). He makes a distinction between textual limitation and author's limitation and how it is never quite in reader's reach to grasp these. His quotation on Paul De Man's claim that the inspiration is already on decline as composition begins reflects this well: there are several limitations regarding writings. First, a physical textual limitation (ink, paper, investments...) and another is language limitation. Whatever the author truly means, the reader will not be able to quite grasp it just by its text. He also mentions the limitations of paratexts in the article. This was very interesting claim because we as readers never even look at paratexts most of the times. Introductions, preface, back of the cover, reviews may be abundant in certain books but most of the times, readers skip all this parts and go straight to the text itself. McGann says, "Texts are always full of noise, and the age-old struggle with the ambiguities and paradoxes of texts registers the unhappiness of information transmitters with a medium not ideally suited to their specialized purpose" (McGann, 14). His argument that the texts are often transmitters catch my attention. All the noises, or paratexts, attempt to deliver extra information to the readers but all of these are factors of textual limitations. The true inspiration can never be really delivered straight to us like how author imagined it. All in all, this textual reading gave me a great insight into how much we as readers know about the limitations of literature, language and its power of communication.

Derrida on Love

I just thought I'd share this link with everyone since we'll be discussing Derrida tomorrow. It's a video I always get a laugh out of because it's Derrida in all his binary-obsessed, complex-to-the-point-of-frustration glory. Can you even imagine being in this poor woman's position who is interviewing him? Aside froma ll that, I think his position on love here kind of speaks to this idea of the center not being fixed in "Structure, Sign, and Play" with respect to his insistance that love depends on the "who" and the "what". Check it out if you have the time and maybe we can touch upon it in class tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

Textuality Reality

After reading McGann's Intro and Chp. 1 of "The Textual Condition," I couldn't help but be reminded of a New Yorker article I once read regarding Raymond Carver's relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. You can read it here. Basically, Carver felt that Lish had edited his stories down too much, so that it felt like it was no longer Carver's authorial voice coming through the text, but Lish's.

Judge for yourselves by reading the differences between the "original" and the "edited" stories.

Raymond Carver's original story
The edited story

Understandably, this goes in a different direction than what I understand McGann is saying in this week's assigned reading, but I couldn't help but think that it might be applicable to our discussion tomorrow.

Is Textual Criticism Really that Deomcratizing? And what's with all the variables?

In his essay The Textual Condition” Jerome McGann makes some really throught provoking claims about what constitutes a text which go beyond a consideration of origination or authorial intention and call for a return to what has always been right in front of us, the text itself. He posits that all interaction takes place within a material, physical dimension and that since the acts of reading and writing are communicative and epistemological exchanges we should examine them as they are.

The most interesting aspect of the article for me was when McGann introduced this idea of “variables” because I feel like it so succinctly characterized what post-structuralist thinkers fall all over themselves to articulate, which is this idea of the proliferation of meaning in any one text. On page 10 he writes of the differences in interpretation that arise in the consumption of any kind of text ,“These differences arise from variables that will be found on both sides of the textual transaction: in the texts themselves and in the readers of the texts...Every text has variants of itself screaming to get out, or antithetical texts screaming to make themselves known...Various readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presences are scripted at the most material levels.” We see this at work in the Introduction to Billy Budd with the various revisions Melville’s manuscript was subjected to and how the various editors were always missing something either purposely or accidentally.

McGann goes on a few pages later to talk about how studying the materiality of a text, a practice he calls “material hermeneutics”, offers a “more global and a more uniform view of texts and the process of textual production” (14). While I understand that with his turn to materiality he is trying to craft a more egalitarian approach to textual analysis, I don’t see how this can be so because I feel like what he is doing requires access to very privileged, archival information. I used to think literary theory was elitist until I realized it was presenting me with a range of tools with which to analyze perspectives and most importantly the contexts of those perspectives. I guess in a nutshell it has real political and cultural implications, implications which I’m failing to see in textual criticism. I’m sure I’m missing something, but this kind of criticism just seems tedious and almost anti-intellectual. Really looking forward to some clarification in our discussion tomorrow night!

The Singular Self, Autonomy, the Death of the Author and... Students

I don't want to drag us from moving forward with ideas, but all this structuralist and post-structuralist talk is, while interesting for me The Writer (says me), highly problematic, or seemingly so, as a teacher.

It might help to understand how I teach, or my main 'ethic', if there is one. I instruct Basic Skills and Composition. But that isn't really what I teach or what I see myself as teaching. Those were terrible classes to take, I wouldn't do that to someone else. In my version, it is more or less a combination of critical ethics, critical thinking, and critical and personal writing. You can't write well without thinking well or speaking well or vice versa, so the whole English 1A...B...C cycle is silly, inmho.

Anyway, one of the first things we talk about is the sentence. Subject, predicate, right? Usually a couple people get that. But I ask again. Ok. Noun, verb. And maybe a couple more people get that. And what is that? Things doing. There is your basic sentence, the one you see everywhere or hear people talking about: things doing. Everything else is just a build off of that, right?

Well, not exactly. I mean, not for practical purposes anyway. When you think about it, all communication is someone telling someone else something. It is about people over here telling people over there. But what? Things doing? Not really. I mean, yeah: if you write botany papers, ok. But the overwhelming majority of what we say, tell, read, communicate, isn't about things doing at all. It is about us. People.

Someone is always doing (something to someone for some ends and to some effect). Even if it isn't in any one sentence, it is there. A good reader finds out. A good writer just shares in the first place.

That is the real sentence. But we screw it up. Often with plain 'ol passive voice, refusing to reveal directly the actor of the sentence or to make them the subject. Passive aggressively not holding them accountable. But it gets worse than that. If you look at journalistic writing you especially see this problem. "Deficit talks broke down Friday." Really? Wow, cause I thought people were doing stuff. It is stand in, lazy, passive metaphor, almost innuendo for a supposedly knowing reader. Code: John Boehner stopped talking to the President Friday. And you can go further. The consequence of him doing so is that maybe the large group of mostly men who have the job "congress" attached to their name, won't vote to increase the deficit. But even that needs to be unpacked. The news says: "US about to default on debt if the debt ceiling isn't raised." All like it is in some sort of vacuum. The US nothing. If those dudes do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, which is really about saying they agree to pay for stuff they already bought, then the President believes that he will not be able to tell the Treasury Secretary to keep writing checks and sending them out to creditors, which are groups of people who lent us money in the past. And, so what? Well, other bad things, because then other people, and those people, won't lend money back to us, and really, yes, us. And that means no nothing. No school, no Pell Grants, no Student Loans, no unemployment, no check to grandma, no healthcare. Everything just sorta stops. And why didn't people get that? Cause no one would just say that these people doing this thing will effect these people. Or why. Because that is the republican agenda and that is a longer conversation.

All of this being a long way to get to the ethics part, which comes later, about being autonomous sentient beings either treating other people, in any given moment, as tools toward some end, or as also other sentient beings and thus ends in themselves. I somehow got very Kantian.

Anyway, the writer died is a terrible way to teach. Foucault helps somewhat, but not entirely. I don't just teach this way because I think it works. But it does. These kids don't see themselves as authors, as autonomous. It is why they haven't taken the whole schooling thing seriously. They have been taught to be good little cogs, tools of the system. This is true of the spoiled rich kids in Alabama, the farm kids in Kentucky, the inner city kids in San Francisco and Berkeley, and the suburban kids in Fremont. I want them to see that as insulting and do something about it. Talking about responsibility and autonomy excites them. It works, and I am inclined to believe it is right.

But that is... perhaps too simplistic. It does not seem to mesh with these other ideas about the complexity of the author. Or, god don't let me get started on human systems. Or even, actually, the autonomy of the reader. I hope for it as a happy side effect, but unlike other teachers I have observed, I do not start out emphasizing the reader as such. The way they come in is that if the author doesn't do a good enough job, they have let the reader own their story, which means they can do whatever they like. So, I tell them that the author should own it. The author is.... kinda a dictator. Which seems highly problematic.

I am not at all convinced that these ideas are all mutually exclusive. But they do seem problemizing.

Here is my pre-language, poetic reaction

:(

Going to go read more Freire. For some comfort.

Foucault and the "Author" as "Creator-God"

I am curious about Foucault’s discussion/deconstruction of the construction of the author as “a transcendental anonymity” (Theory and Criticism 1479). It seems like he both affirms and deconstructs the idea of the author as creator-God at the same time. He affirms by conceding that “The disappearance of the author […] is held in check by the transcendental” (1479), and then undercuts the power of the transcendental by drawing the line that separates modern twentieth-century ideology with nineteenth-century “historical and transcendental tradition” (1479). He obviously characterizes himself as among the self-liberated, thus divorcing himself from the power of the transcendental.

In light of this, I am curious how such a position relates to Whitman in particular since it could be argued that he can be read as positing himself as author/creator-God, while at the same time undercutting the notion of God on a theological level (I am thinking specifically of Leaves of Grass). Additionally, Foucault himself could be seen as positing himself as author/creator-God because of the theories he posits in What Is an Author? concerning his conception of the “author-function.”

It seems like all of these instances reject the transcendental entity of a theological God while relating that subject position to the author as creator of a text, at the same time pronouncing themselves in creator-God roles as authors of their own texts (i.e. Whitman and Foucault). It almost seems like they topple one tyrannical figure, while assuming the position they just deposed. It is almost arguable that the entire concept of “the death of the author” is related to the twentieth-century declaration of the death of God. If God, the transcendental does not exist, then all relatable subject position, like the author, must also disappear. Just a thought.

Borges and Issues of Authorship

"If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is more significant."


"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

...

As I have been thinking about questions of authorship both leading up to and since our class last Thursday I found myself continually returning back to some thoughts by Borges that have been a major influence in my own views on the topic. At just about two pages or so "Kafka and His Precursors," is more evocative than explanatory, and can hardly be called high theory in any sense of the term, but considering that he is writing more than a decade before Barthes and Foucault, I think he possibly provides an interesting bridge between postmodern theories of authorship and more traditional conceptions of the author.

The purpose of the essay, according to Borges, was to try and sketch out some precursors to Kafka, in his view a "singular" voice in literature. Borges then goes on to compose a surprising list of possible precursors: Zeno, Kierkegaard and Browning, as well as Bloy and Lord Dunsany (who?). An eclectic and in some ways surprising list (Browning?) jumbling together ancient and modern, the well known and the comparatively obscure. "If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other," he writes, "the second fact is more significant." He briefly fleshes out this idea: "in the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry," followed by the now-famous phrase: "the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

To our postmodern minds this might not seem a particularly radical statement (though if you're Harold Bloom they might constitute fightin' words). But it's the type of paradox that Borges loved, a complete disruption of the type of linear filial lines traditionally used to analyze history and literature and the tracing of authors and movements and their subsequent influence over time. In Borges's conception, a work is not simply an endpoint in a long and complex tangle of history, society, art, etc., but rather the starting point where, streaming backwards, alternative histories can be constructed filled with links and connections that might not have been accounted for, if they had previously been there at all.

Thinking of all of this within the context of our discussions of Barthes and Foucault, it struck me how I think this conception accounts for structuralist thought, but it doesn't kill the Author outright, something most of us still can't quite bring ourselves to do. Borges is in line with structuralism as he admits that as unique as Kafka's writing might seem, he's not, in fact, singular. Rather, his work draws from the vast body of knowledge(s) that historically preceded him, regardless of whether these influences were intentional or purely chance affinities. But Borges also seems to have no intention of considering Kafka-as-Author dead either, but seems to hold that his texts are indeed sites of individuality, that Kafka negotiates and arranges influences in a way that was never done in quite the same way. It is in that specific way he might truly be considered singular.

As I said in class last week, I am not convinced of the autonomy of the author, of the implicit Descartian "I" who maintains God-like control over her/his own work (and even processing his her/his own experiences). But on the other hand, I must admit, I'm not willing to kill and completely erase the presence of the author either. Borges has helped me negotiate this—for me, the author is certainly not an autonomous or singular entity/presence, but rather composes any work out of the tiny bits and pieces (or the morphemes, if you will) of art and history, and also language. In that sense, nothing that an author writes can ever be truly unique. But a singularity perhaps is possible, but of a particular type: singularity in the particular, idiosyncratic arrangement of the morphemes we-the-Author have been provided and can never escape from.

Kafka and His Precursors in its entirety can be read here (yes, it's that short).

Is the Author Really Dead?

For this posting, I am going to focus on Barthes with particular focus on his declaration of "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end…the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding in us.'" Barthes states that a text is separate from the author, deriding academia's focus on the author's life and time period they are in. As an undergraduate student in literature, this was how we were taught to disseminate texts, with a focus on the 'text itself.' That's all well and good (and incredibly simplified, I know) but what happens in the case of the 'death of the author' when they are writing about themselves. In particular, the genre of the memoir and biography? Some authors have made entire careers based on writing about their lives (see David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Michelle Tea), forming their anecdotes in short stories or collections of thematic vignettes. Other others write about a significant time period in their lives, such as a turbulent adolescence or memorable event. What comes to mind is Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which is sold fiction, but is based on Kerouac's true life experiences. Is there a death of the author, Jack Kerouac, and a birth of a character "Kerouac" in the alter-ego of "Sal"? Does On the Road fit in with other texts that are largely autobiographical but not one hundred percent accurate, such as Audre Lorde's Zami? I'm confused as to where the author stops and the text begins in cases such as these.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I hope that we can discuss it tomorrow in class.

The Perks of Being an English Major

Here is the other thing that I mentioned in class on Thursday.

Jersey Shore Gone "Wilde"

As I mentioned in class last week, here it is! Jersey Shore Gone "Wilde", the cast of "The Important of Being Ernest" reenacted lines of dialogue from the reality show, Jersey Shore, in the style of Oscar Wilde.

http://youtu.be/Mhk5Rjz7xk0

There are 5 parts total, make sure you watch them all!

Fun with Chatbots

Here is a link to the segment on Chatbots from NPR that Prof. Goodwin and I were talking about yesterday in class. Not only interesting, but hilarious. Enjoy!

Robot-To-Robot Chat Yields Curious Conversation

-jesse

insignification ≠ insignificance

"Insignification" is a play on words instigated in part by the technological, economic, social, linguistic forum I've chosen for our online class discussion: this blog. I tried several other names for the blog – attempts at evocative but easy to remember monikers that can be condensed into the tag end of a URL – but they were all taken. As such, the title of this blog illustrates one of Ferdinand de Saussure's central claims about language: "The distinguishing characteristic of the sign – but the one that is least apparent at first sight – is that it always eludes the individual or social will." Whereas speech is at the command of the individual, language "is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual." In other words, we don't control language, we live within it. The rules and conventions that come along with a particular blogging platform can be seen as a reflection of the massive accretion of rules and conventions that structure language itself. So this is a great place for us to explore the question, What does it mean to live in signification? If there are no ideas prior to language, but language can only point imperfectly toward ideas and never even approach real things, as Saussure argues, is every speech act within this signifying system doomed to insignificance?

We'll see the influence of Saussure's Course on General Linguistics on almost all of the theorists we read in this course. It seems to me that everyone from Cleanth Brooks to Donna Haraway has worked to dislodge the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified that Saussure delineates here. And literature itself, I believe, is constantly making renovations on the signifying structure that Saussure describes. We'll see how successful those renovations have been.