Seamless Subsubsubjectivity

Quixote Voyage life southdeath, boat, cabs, train, steps, errante two men at once hybrid criollo doublings/splittings two lineages, two deaths, dreams and fantasies/reality Catriel fighting for both sides, the passion – time scarlet past and the present pink memory youth/age future/past.. solitude, county/city solitude North South history repetition and more repetition Derrida summer after summer. . . , certainty becomes unfixed and SOMETHING HAPPENS! And again! Choices are made to live….even in possible death – Quixote Eternity/Instant/mortality/immortality READING AND WRITING …..CREATING . . . . .

And Martín Fierro? The knife fighting gaucho a past lived with passion in face of the reality, not the abstraction of (physical) death

Arabian Nights (with pages missing!) tales ending only to begin again- fate – Dahlman subject of his fate. He takes the stairs, and something brushes his forehead! Bat/death AWAKE! Flavour of all things monstrous Eight days also eight hundred years, like old man outside time. Cab- A Room that Was not His Own. Cell Well cave. Virginia Wolf. The body. Death is not abstract but always part of our present. Dahl = valley?

Symmetries and anachronisms of reality. Cab – City and house public/private memory yellow light interior courtyards.

Cab- South = older and stabler world almost secret courtyard, the familiar old in the unfamiliar new

Café illusory contact with cat pane of glass transparencies and reflections. Time in Successiveness/The Eternity of The Instant. Magical Arabian Nights challenge to evil to the torment of the spirit/body

Train and the wonder of Being, Scherazade’s superfluous miracles. Wondrous fact of Being! Allowed himself Simply to Live!

The body and memory bouillon

Two Men at Once! Voyage/Imprisonment. Spirit/body. World/Nostalgic Literary Knowledge!

Rushing train White to Yellow to Red Sun. The plains and time transfigure the train/life. All Vast and Intimate – Secret  Perfect/Hostile solitude. Accepting the different station, the uncanny curve in life’s trajectory to the

Unfamiliar

The Subject accepts the adventure Walking slowly inhaling with the grave happiness the smell of clover.

RED passion of past sorry architecture Paul et Virginie naturaleza/sociedad, The doubling of the owner, unfamiliar/familiar back to sanitorium To Add Yet Another Event to That Day = Subject

Youth/Age THE GAUCHO/HISTORY POLISHED AS A STONE BY WATER BY A SAYING BY GENERATIONS OF HUMANKIND OUTSIDE TIME IN A SORT OF ETERNITY

Darkness smells sounds Something brushes his face bread/life – past, indigenous youth labourer/present criollo writer

Arabian Nights to block out reality They are feeling their oats and He Is Named

No longer an accidental face

Insults as though he were far away from life? Exaggeration of drunkenness fierce and mocking

SOMETHING UNFORSEEABLE HAPPENS – The South decides he must accept the challenge – instinct and action    life not allowed  LIFE NOT ALLOWED IN SANITORIUM

 ENOUGH STALLING! ENGAGE!

No hope, no fear creating his fate – rejecting One death unaware in the sanatorium in favour of life and choice with death as part of life CATRIEL/FIERRO THE ROMANTIC DEATH/The WRITER In A Room of his own creation CREATING .  . .

Spivak urges readers to deconstruct texts by acknowledging their complicity. She agrees with Said that literary writing reproduces Western hegemonic power over the Other and is interested in the way knowledge and power intersect. From colonization to globalization, socio-economic inequality has created texts that allow the West to ‘know’ the Third World. (What about the Second World?) However, although Spivak recognizes Said’s Orientalism and Guha’s conception of the heterogeneity of subaltern groups, she does not agree that this means that the subaltern subject as represented in dominant discourse can be read as existing outside it.

What about the women who refuse to sleep with their men if they go to war with the neighbouring tribe? (True story) Or, what about the chief that decides he wants the Canadian government to build a bridge at no cost, and protests outside the embassy until he gets it built? 

Using Derrida’s theory of desconstruction, where change occurs from within the difference of the sign, and “self” is itself always production rather than ground, she claims that our sense of self is structured like writing. In other words, the iterability of identity, or the irreducible nature of identity precludes the existence of the agented subject outside of dominant discourse.

I still have problems with this! It seems that dominant discourse homogenizes the West, so that welfare mums in Vancouver, for example, are not part of the equation.

We are all subject-effects positioned in various discourses whose interests are written into our texts. This does not mean that we can escape these discourses completely, but that we can be aware of them (of subaltern silences) when we look at texts so that perhaps in time we can hear the voices of Others. We can transform “impossibility into possibility.”

Is it enough only to be aware of the mute Other? Is there nothing else readers and writers can do? Spivak doesn’t talk about action.

Her point is that there is no resistance or subaltern consciousness completely separate from dominant discourse. Guha seeks to avoid essentializing the subaltern group by pointing to its plurality, but Spivak argues that he still assumes that there is a subaltern consciousness.

Looking at the role of women in patriarchal communities, Spivak comes to the conclusion that if female subaltern consciousness is a “red herring” then so must be the subaltern subconscious.

The position of women in various communities “syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she is herself drained of proper identity.” Similarly, the heterogeneous subaltern groups “syntaxes” hegemonic discourse. Therefore, only by working within discourses and acknowledging “the complicity between subject and object investigation” can women and men be producers of signs in Derrida’s process of propriation.

Questions:

Why do I still feel that the world is divided into the First and Third World without any in-between?

What practices go along with her theory? Yes, we should read texts carefully to see how they create inequality in the world, but what can the peasant girl do?

Are there different kinds of complicity, i.e. the International Monetary Fund vs. CUSO?

Guha

Guha’s analysis of the discourse of history ties in very nicely with Said’s Orientalism.

In hegemonic discourse on colonial history, the peasant insurrections of India are spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs in which agency, either individual or collective, played no role. In other words, in orientalist texts revolt occurs outside the consciousness of subaltern insurgency, which is therefore irrational, instinctive, and uncivilized.

The primary, secondary, and tertiary discourses of official history all serve to silence the subaltern voice in history. The immediacy of the official primary discourse, and the distance of the secondary public histories written as personal or ‘impartial’ accounts of administrators’ documentation of events function as indicative and interpretative texts that together produce an historical ‘truth’. This imbrication of discourses reveals an ambiguity in which, a la Barthes, the indices of language (metaphor/being/adjectives) disrupt its functions (metonymy/doing/verbs). The result is ‘loosely cobbled segments’ of meaning that contain gaps or moments of risk that open up alternative possibilities of meaning. (This has Derrida’s iterability and irreducible meaning of the mark written all over it!) Gaps!

Thus dystaxia and Barthes’ ‘organization shifters’ which historiographers use to write history produce both messages and counter-messages in which authors are equally complicit. “The discourse of history, hardly distinguished from policy, . . . becomes a form of colonialist knowledge . . . a discourse of power,” and this takes Guha to the tertiary discourse.

In tertiary discourse, which ostensibly provides a new perspective of past events, writers also create an imaginary past for the Other. As rebelling citizens they do not participate in history, for the causes of rebellion are part of a grander scheme of a universal struggle for freedom from colonial oppression. Adopting the insurgents’ position, the writer of tertiary discourse hopes to support their struggle. However, by claiming an understanding of their cause as one caused by imperialism as a whole as opposed to injustices unique to particular communities, these writers reinforce dominant discourse. Even the insurgent’s religion as part of her/his political consciousness, which is dismissed as fanaticism in secondary discourse, is described as only a tool to manipulate the masses. As with the other two discourses the rebel is not the conscious subject of her/his own history.

I am always suspicious of dividing the world into finite numbers. Are there really only three types of discourse?

I am interested in Guha’s notion of the ambiguity inherent in armed struggle. The historian’s blindness to nuance in the desire to create a monolithic, fixed Other negates the possibility of a frightening, heterogeneous collectivity of insurgents whose history cannot be controlled. GAPS for the subaltern?

I would like to start with a few conclusions of the readings we have done so far. It seems the subject is dead. We have gone from the author as individual creator of the text, to a decentering of the subject, and finally the death of the author. I have no difficulty with the notion that authors are created by other texts. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they write as members of an historic moment of a particular society to which we can never return. Therefore, the author as she/he was at the time of writing is dead, but I don’t think we can eliminate the writer completely from the equation. I see the position of the author as somewhat synechdocical: the individual whose identity is always in flux represents society or a collective subconscious that is also always altering and vice versa. Human beings experience the world individually through the body and the psyche, and these experiences collectively produce societies, which in turn affect individual lives differently.

In other words because subjects, texts and readers are always in a process of becoming, they cannot be given a fixed identity or meaning. In this sense, they/we are part of the continuous performance of the sign – ad infinitum.

 The author is not dead.

Recognizing the Other and Examining Hegemonic Relationships

In Orientalism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, and argues that Western cultural identity developed by distinguishing itself from the Orient as if the latter were a second, inferior self. He further claims that in Western academia Orientalist doctrines continue to reinforce essentialist views of the Orient that imagine an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. As a result, Orientalism has come to represent a hegemonic relationship in which the binary of East versus West serves as a Western “corporate institution” for control over a fictitious East. This imagined East nevertheless exists in a very real form as a relationship between Occident and Orient based on power, domination and complex hegemony. Said cites Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in civil society, where the influence of Orientalist ideas persists by consent rather than imposition, to explain the continued strength of Orientalism as a system of discourse. He calls for a new discursive strategy that recognizes the individuality of nations while impartially examining the general hegemonic relationships between states.

 Possible Problems with the text, Orientalism:

•  Most importantly for me, Said does not write a lot about the resistance of the colonized Other. What about the resisting subject as part of colonial discourse? The colonized nations occupy a non-static space in colonial history from which they have articulated resistance thereby forcing the colonizer to respond in different ways. Does he have a theory of resistance?

• This brings me to the ways in which the marginalized have resisted their oppression. While not sufficient to counterbalance hegemonic texts, they have always had their own texts. Also, whether through corridos, Yoruba chants or rap, they have challenged the West by making use of the spoken word. (Don’t forget visual art, theatre, music, etc…) In other words, the colonized subjects have a conception of themselves that is outside of the Orientalist panopticon.

• Has the binary opposition between West and East always been a fixed feature of Western discourse? Is history not a little bit more complicated? I am thinking, for example, of the French vs. English relationship with their colonial subjects, and the savage vs. the noble savage etc… Said seems to homogenize the West. However, you can argue that despite the differences within hegemonic discourse, the ‘other’ is always inferior.

• Said does not discuss in detail the role of capitalist expansion in the creation of Orientalist texts. In other words, aside from the literary canon of the West, other forces contributed to the creation of the inferior Other.

In sum, while I see the very obvious logic in Said’s argument, perhaps colonial power was not always imposed from above. The more nuanced history of colonization suggests that hegemonic discourse originated from various sources above, below, inside and outside many discourses of power and resistance. Which brings me to . . .

The Anonymous Babble

Foucault’s position regarding knowledge and power informs Said’s theory of Orientalism. As we have seen, the position of the author as the sole source of meaning is challenged from Saussure, Lacan and Althusser to Derrida for whom language constructs or invents the subject. So for Said the Western texts of a variety of disciplines produce knowledge about the Orient that constructs the Other. However, while Said seems to focus on individual Western authors whose works have collectively contributed to Orientalist power structures, Foucault denies the existence of ‘true’ authors. Furthermore, although he welcomes the shift in focus (a la Barthes) from writer to text, he challenges the notion of a work per se which attributes a false coherence to individual works.

Barthes may have claimed that the author is dead, but Foucault explains that the name of an author functions differently at different moments in history, proving that cultural norms determine our understanding of the author’s connection to a particular text.

Foucault’s association of a text’s recognition of ownership with prohibition and punishment, for example, points to how relationships of power are inherent in socio-political and cultural discourse.

Moreover, he claims that names such as Freud and Marx are “founders of discursivity” in that their writings are perpetually modified to inform new discursive practices, unlike scientific texts whose original authority remains unchallenged. In other words, Freud and Marx are the invisible originators of ever-changing discourses, which modify the original discursive practice as they return to it. (But what are they returning to? When we discuss Freud’s psychoanalysis, what are we discussing?) Thus for Foucault, eliminating the study of an author will allow a more objective analysis of how the text ‘performs’ reality/ies.

Final thoughts:

According to Foucault, the only subject is language itself. He is interested in how the text operates within a culture (mostly European it seems). This is wonderful for interdisciplinary studies and coincides with Said’s notion of Orientalist texts that come from a variety of disciplines. However, if there is no subject, no self, then individual voices of ‘othered’ societies have no agency.

Therefore, while I can see how the Orientalist vision in texts has constructed unequal power relations between peoples, I think that the world has always been made up of more than the two cardinal directions (East and West). Also, texts are produced by societies and individuals alike, the Palestinian-American intellectual voice of Edward Said writing of Orientalism, or that of the African-American feminist, bell hooks, on transgender, for example.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a great tale whose artful use of language and form propel the reader towards an ambivalent end that demands reflection. This tale is a gripping example of art that requires no knowledge of its author or context. Of course there are references to the American South of the 50’s and earlier, the Mikado, and the Old Testament. However, even without these references, the story speaks to common human experience and questions of morality, and the role of the individual in society. Because I have written quite a bit, I have highlighted the major points.

The story begins with a negative construction regarding an individual’s WANT: the grandmother has no desire to go on a family trip to Florida, and she spends the first part of the story manipulating everyone so that she can go to Tennessee. At this point in the text, she is a harmlessly annoying old woman and the family appears to be caught up in the details of the mundane. We immediately get an image of a thin, elderly self-righteous mater familias (she is nameless) who claims that she is at peace with her conscience, unlike her son who she is effectively guilt-tripping to make him change his plans to suit hers. Her daughter-in-law and the baby are also nameless, but her son is Bailey (officer of justice?), her grandson is John Wesley (founder of the Methodist movement that encourages people to experience Christ personally), and her granddaughter is June Star (Venus, Light bearer, Lucifer and very Hollywood).

During the discussion about the vacation, the grandmother, father and children are reading the paper where the grandmother sees the story about the Misfit. The newspaper as a means of communication does not seem to encourage conversation between the family members. The minimal exchange that comes from the paper centers on modern life and its preoccupation with social hierarchy and wealth; the grandmother, say the son and daughter, won’t stay home “to be queen for a day” or “a million bucks.”

The grandmother refuses to stay home (to face herself?) but appears to have some redeeming features as she hides her cat, Pitty Sing or Pretty/Pity Thing (The Mikado), because she is concerned that he will miss her; however, we wonder who will miss whom? Her apparent concern for the cat is a mask for her selfishness. We soon learn that the grandmother is all about appearances. She is dressed like a lady in case she should die on the road. Her hat in particular represents her gentility, and her fear of being in an accident foreshadows the family’s tragedy (in which her hat is destroyed), as does the graveyard, the town Toomsboro, the “hearse-like automobile” and the “open mouth” of the woods where the wind later moves “like a long satisfies insuck of breath” (I love this line) when Bailey and his son are shot.

A key transition in the story occurs when they go from urban spaces to the country and pass Stone Mountain (Confederate sculpture and KKK base camp) about halfway into the paragraph. So we travel with the family through the billboards of American industry to a very colourful natural landscape. They are moving from society and all that comes with it, social morality, consumerism etc… to a world where these no longer hold sway.

This is a pivotal point because suddenly the grandmother doesn’t seem harmless anymore. They pass a black child and she wants to paint him as if he were a cow in a picturesque country field. The black boy is part of the natural scenery and hardly present. He does not “have things like we do.” He is physically outside the car, cut off from civilization and all things human, and she would like to keep him there in a painting. The grandmother now is engaging in a passive violence against the other that the reader finds unacceptable. The child waves at them, but they don’t acknowledge his existence and only open the window to dump their garbage.

The sighting of the child followed by a view of a plantation graveyard reminds the reader of the history of slavery in the US which has “Gone with the Wind,” a reference to the civil war that has become Hollywood entertainment, worlds away from the past and present realities of the oppressed. In other words not gone at all.

There is then a doubling effect when the children play a guessing game with the clouds. A cloud is first a cow and then a car. These images confound the black child with the children in the car who are now the observed. In other words, in this story, who is observing whom? The reader is part of the text.

The more the grandmother reveals her dependence on appearance, the more we realize that her idea of being a lady has nothing to do with being a decent human being. Her tale of Mr.EAT demonstrates how she equates goodness with position and wealth.

At the Tower (Tower of Babel which God shatters to create many languages out of one) they  lament the lack of “nice” people these days. The repetition of the words ‘trust’ and ‘good’ render the terms meaningless, especially when used by Red Sam (American Communist?), his wife and the grandmother. Their goodness does not extend to the chained monkey biting fleas off himself as “as if they were a delicacy.” (Echoes of navel gazing?)

The superficiality of the modern world comes up again with the treasure hidden in the grandmother’s imaginary house. She knows that the tale of the lost silver will interest the children who have been brought up to value material wealth. Later, when they are lost, the only shame the grandmother feels is not due to the fact that she lies to her family about the house but that she will be caught out. Morality it seems is a question of what you can get away with while appearing to be an upright citizen of the world.

More Doubling

Pitty Sing snarls before he causes the accident as the Misfit does later when saying there is “no pleasure but meanness”. The cat is the Misfit’s double in that he causes the family’s destruction. But Pitty Sing is also the grandmother because she is the one who recognizes the Misfit so that he must kill them. In other words, the grandmother and the Misfit are one and the same: individuals outside goodness. She is a false ‘lady’, and he with his good manners is a false gentleman. (She asks him to pray but does not pray herself, and he responds that Jesus has upset the balance – the punishment no longer matches the crime). The Misfit appears to be referring to the Christian belief that we are all born sinners; however, I think the problem is that the system’s/man’s interpretation of right and wrong does not always mean justice. Anyway, the Misfit is beyond concepts of good and evil. For him the sky has no sun and no cloud. The grandmother and Misfit are individuals who have chosen their own morality outside of their community. Both are taking care of number one.

The juxtaposition of the mundane and the uncanny grotesque create an ambivalence, which at the end of the text reflects the switching of roles that the Grandmother and the Misft play. The condemning woman becomes the condemned and the condemned convict becomes an executioner.

In this ambiguity, space opens up for a new perspective on the world. The grandmother for once thinks of someone else, and the other is no longer at a distance as she reaches out to touch the Misfit. She dies looking at a now cloudless sky. Similarly, the Misfit no longer sees pleasure in killing. He removes his glasses and with defenseless-looking eyes ‘sees’ both the grandmother’s epiphany and that killing is “no pleasure in life.”

Rejoicing the Crisis in the Name

Judith Butler’s notion that language is performative and therefore can be used as a tool to subvert dominant discourse is very appealing. For Butler, gender and race are social constructs that can be deconstructed through the ‘slippage’ or the failure of the performative, which opens a space of resistance for the marginalized. She cites Spivak’s “enabling violation” to explain how agency can be realized from within the conditions of oppression. The repetition of hegemonic terms can “reverse and displace their originating aims.”

The iterability of the terms of subjectivation creates a space of ambivalence that allows the other to rework them (Derrida anyone?). Butler claims that heterosexuality as the normative ideal seeks to both naturalize itself and render itself original so homosexuality becomes a product of repudiated heterosexual love. However, Butler insists that when a drag queen imitates the ideal woman it becomes clear that the ideal does not exist. No performance of sexual norms can reach this ideal, and the resulting gap between the ideal and reality opens up an ambivalent space from which other voices can speak and be heard. The drag performance then can create agency as the “Queen will out-woman women.” (I really like this!) In this way, the fetishization of the feminine ideal can bring about a symbolic crisis which will in turn effect a crisis in the morphological stability of the name ‘woman’, or ‘man’.

In other words, the language of oppression can be used against itself, so to speak, to reveal that terms overtly fixed in meaning are inherently ambiguous. And if this is so, they no longer refer to their original referent. In this way, through the reworked terms imposed identities are exchanged for space to construct new ones.

Butler’s text reminds me of the old films in which Carmen Miranda sings with a pineapple? on her head. She represents the quintessential Latina: loud, colorful, exotically over the top. She is so ridiculous that her parody of the stereotypical Latin American female proves the fallacy of the myth. The Irish Spring soap ads do the same regarding the ideal man.

Any problems?

I think that some may question using the language of oppression to resist its power. There may be the danger that this will only strengthen the performativity of language that has traumatized generations of people living in the interstices of society. They might call for the invention of a new language to remove the shackles of the old. However, Butler claims that the “I” cannot extract itself from the history that created it and gains agency from the power relations it hopes to undermine.

Who Can Speak for Whom?

When bell hooks asks if we can imagine a black woman lesbian making a film about white gay subculture, I find it very difficult to justify my pursuit of an MA in post-colonial studies. I mean, who am I to comment on the experience of the colonial subject? I write about trauma at the hands of European hegemony, but even as an Irish-Canadian woman my experience cannot be called trauma. There is no real ‘post’ in subaltern studies. People continue to suffer the ravages of the European legacy of expansion. I have no answer to bell’s question; just a rather shamefaced and pathetic shrug is all I can come up with. Perhaps my experience as a privileged expat at local public schools in West Africa urges me to make some sense of it all.

One incident in particular that occurred at school when I was about eight or nine haunts me. Hassana, a Fulani girl and I were sent to the principal, Mrs. Jarma, to receive punishment for running around a public swimming pool. Hassana was beaten with a ruler and emerged from the office with a huge gash on her upper arm. When it was my turn to be dealt with, Mrs. Jarma spoke to me harshly and sent me on my way. Writing this makes me very aware that the story is mine in every sense of the word: my world, my words, Hassana’s lack of space, her quiet sobbing . . .

Yes, whiteness informs my perspective, so how can I write about/for the multitudinous Other without taking their space? Maybe our only option is to write/read, film/watch, sing/listen with or alongside one another.

Another point hooks makes is that films such as Paris Is Burning often make spectacle out of ritualized play and commodify blackness. Her point brings to mind the traditional Sunday night documentary (the objective ethnographer’s gaze) in which empowering forms of self-expression, such as theatre depicting slavery in the Ivory Coast, become exotic entertainment for North Americans.

The appropriation of dominant discourse to articulate social and cultural identities is one way of resisting oppression and dismantling cultural essentialism; however, there is a need for global institutions of higher learning to open themselves up to indigenous texts, films, music, etc… Perhaps this way the sexist/racist ideas, for example, that black men are hyper-masculine, that whiteness personifies the idea of femininity, that gay men are feminine will give way to the possibility that there are many ways of being in the world.

Raymond Williams

“Clearly there is something in the psychology of print and image that none of us has yet quite grasped.” Raymond Williams says this after discussing his family’s ability to appreciate “culture”. Their finesse of feeling, quick discrimination, and clear grasp of ideas are evidence of what he calls the false equation of the “badness” of popular culture as a reflection of the mental development of its consumers. In other words, all human beings are able to appreciate art, which has the mysterious quality that engages perceivers regardless of their education, class, religion, time etc…And what remains constant before all these viewers throughout history? Form. But that is a topic for another day. Back to the text.

Williams’ argument that culture is always traditional and creative and made up of both ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings makes sense, especially when you apply this definition to literature. First, tradition is part of a text not in the form of a fixed past but one that is also continuously being rewritten to create new narratives in the present. Secondly, literature engages individuals as part of a common humanity that is in a continual process of development.

While Williams accepts the Marxist theory that there is a strong relationship between culture and production, and that education is restricted to a privileged few, he rejects the notion that there is an ignorant mass of working class people that are excluded from a dying English culture. The Marxists demand a different system of production that can save English culture. However, argues William, culture cannot be prescribed as it is made and remade (organically he might say today) by people who are living. Literature, as we have discussed in class, is always in a process creation.

Williams goes on to disprove several myths about the effects of the development of industrial society. First, he rejects the idea that the price we must pay for economic power and is a “cheapened” culture. Second, he does not agree that commercial culture is a product of popular education, i.e. now that “the masses are educated” culture is going out the window. There are no masses; it is only a word for othering people. In fact, there were just as many trashy newspapers before public education, and there is much more good literature in circulation today.

Finally, Williams calls for a common education that will foster a socialist democratic community whose cultural institutions enrich the lives of ordinary people.

I really enjoyed this reading. His understanding of culture as a continual process that gives agency to individuals and communities, a process that cannot be planned by ideology, describes the conversation that literature forces us to engage in without losing our subjectivity.

Auras from Forms

I am trying to understand what the aura of a work of art is. Benjamin explains that modernity has changed the way we perceive art. In particular, the mechanical reproduction of art has resulted in the loss of the aura. It seems that auras in art only occur when a work is authentic, original and not reproduced, and this is the reason films as reproductions of images do not have them. I have difficulty grasping this idea because I keep thinking of films that Benjamin would consider inauthentic works of art but that I feel that do not aestheticize politics to support a fascist cause.

Trinh Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage would be a good example of politicized art that is original while at the same time reproducible. Films that document daily life have a certain realist aesthetic that engages the audience’s intellect and sensory perceptions in the same way that they are employed in life. Trinh Minh-ha’s film appears to meet Benjamin’ definition of “auraless” art. In her film, Trinh focuses on the mundane and the natural rhythms of a Senegalese village without resorting to the gloss of a didactic ethnographic documentary of the National Geographic kind. There is no voice-over of the traditional ethnographer’s film that tells the audience what to think, and nothing is explained to provoke a particular response in the viewer. Images are woven into a collage of rhythms that we decipher with our senses, so that rather than simply watching the scenes we experience them. She doesn’t produce what Banjamin calls “reception in distraction” or entertainment founded on shock effects. The audience members are left to experience a Senegalese village as if they were there, and to make any conclusions on their own terms. The resulting effect negates the stereotype of the Western anthropologist who has unlocked the secrets of an Other primitive culture. We are presented with a world that exists independently of the West in a form of art that ‘reproduces’ life to show its lack of any one truth.

Trinh’s art entices the viewer into considering the existence of a multiplicity of possible realities in flux. Her editing skills create the form of her work, which is inseparable from the film’s content. As in any art form, the ORIGINAL shaping of the raw footage IS the content of the film.

So we are back to form. The more I read, the more I like the idea that art is form is art. Whatever art does, it all starts with how its form triggers the conversation among the perceiver(s).

“Le vert est ou”

Austin and Literature

The notion that when we speak we are performing actions that our words refer to and that these utterances are neither true nor false, must have been obvious when people heard themselves being called “Heretic” during the Spanish Inquisition. The horror they felt was due to the fact that once declared a heretic, one became one regardless of the ‘truth’ of the matter. Unfortunately, this declaration was often in Austin’s terms a ‘felicitous’ performative. However, the notion that all language is performative is new and really quite frightening for me.

If one applies Austin’s theory to literature, the implications for the reader are serious for literary language is also performative; it is not true or false, and it creates/makes real the world it ‘speaks’ of. This means that it also brings to life the ideas, morals, ideology that lie within the text. In other words, literature helps to shape/perform the world. And the repetition of Western ideology over centuries would then only serve to ensure that certain ideologies are deeply entrenched in communities where texts ‘perform’ acts. We have seen this before in Althusser, for example.

Literature creates reality to override other realities. Therefore, when texts ‘speak’ of women and men, the idea of woman and man is performed. This suggests that gender is a construct of literary language. In other words, there is no woman or man as such outside of the text. We are female or male animals whose social performance is just that, a performance constructed in great part by language and the society that language performs. This might apply to any cultural construction of human beings. Extrapolating further, literature can transform reality. Then text might not construct female and male human beings but discover many possible varieties of individuals.

Questions:

1.  What is felicitous and infelicitous literary language? Perhaps felicitous literary language is literature that uses language and form to successfully engage its audience in a ‘conversation’ that stimulates reflection on human experience. Infelicitous literary language would fail to do this. But then a lot of what we call non-literary texts becomes literature.

2.  Where does meaning come from, or where is the subject in language? Austin claims that the speaker’s words and not her/his intention are performative. This means that you mean what you say/do, not what you think. However, when I say, “I love you” to my great-grandmother my intention is to tell her how much she means to me, so my intention is embedded in my words/actions, isn’t it?

Similarly, if I say, “I love you” to a partner I am thinking of breaking up with to delay the inevitable, my words ‘perform’ my intention as well as the ‘infelicitous’ illocutionary act of falsely declaring my love for the other person.

3.  Why are the words of an actor not performative? (I asked this before I read the next text)

“Percussion in mis major”

Limited Inc. is very difficult to follow, and I really can’t pretend to understand it all. However, I did at least grasp the tone, and I couldn’t help chuckling when I read what looks like a rant against poor Austin.

His argument owes a lot to Austin’s concept of performative language, but for Derrida the theory is flawed for several reasons:

1.  The writer does not have to be present. Searle says a shopping list and notes to a colleague during a lecture require the author’s presence. Derrida’s argument still holds as the shopping list and notes can be used repeatedly at other times. I have no problems with this idea, For example, once at an airport, someone behind a double glass wall wrote a message for me on the glass. I am sure that the glass was cleaned that day, and neither the writer nor I ever saw it again. However, it was quoted several times in many other contexts, resulting in different meanings each time. Therefore, even when a text is destroyed, its language can live on.

2. Requiring a speaker to be sincere suggests that there is meaning outside the text, but all meaning is in the text.

However, Derrida is addressing Austin (Sarl) and his ideas were formed over the course of his education in France. Doesn’t his resistance to traditional readings of texts come from his engagement with theorists from Plato on?

Searle argues that intentions do not always need to be conscious and sees no need for the separation of intention from the expression of intention. I agree that the two converge at times, and I don’t see how this convergence contradicts Derrida’s idea that texts infinitely defer meaning. Borges’ texts will be interpreted with and without consideration of his intention, but it is difficult to believe no trace of Borges remains in his work. When we read, we are discovering more of the world, and Borges remains in it through his writing. As we have discussed in class, the point of literature is to generate conversation on the human experience, not to arrive at a single possible meaning. The text keeps the dialogue going because meaning is elusive (even its origin!) The phrase, “Le vert est ou” repeated (used) in certain academic circles has and will have various meanings each time it is repeated. It might speak of Searle’s argument, of Derrida’s theory, of an example bad grammar, etc…

Also, I cannot help thinking of testimonial literature, and I worry that excluding the author and her/his history might be silencing Others. When women in South Korea write stories of their double oppression in a patriarchal society under a totalitarian regime, they use a certain voice and form to change the world. Yes, their text is performative, but if we don’t acknowledge their authorship, can we say that we are listening to their voices? They are writing to change the present world as well as any number of worlds in the future. If someone cries, “Help”, don’t we need to know whom it is in order to respond?

When a narrative about past events subverts oppressive discourse by creating a plurality of perspectives, the author and readers recuperate the past to inform the present. In this case, the text is dependent on realities outside and inside its language.

3.  “Parasitic” or “Non-serious” language utterances are no different form any other utterance.  And although signs appear before speech, and not the other way around as Austin claims, all language is performative. Searle claims that Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” language was temporary. This seems odd. Derrida’s attack on Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” utterances makes sense to me. If you have a theory about language, why exclude such a large portion of the language we use? Derrida claims that all utterances are repeatable and it is this very iterability of language that makes it performative.

4.  The iterability of written language in the absence of the writer makes it performative for with every iteration there is a break with a previous perfomative context to perpetually defer an ultimate meaning. Searle claims that Derrida is confusing iterability with permanence, but reprinted texts are read differently each time, and thus iterative.

I like the idea that literature’s performativity and iterability perpetually defers meaning so that texts can transform the world. However, I don’t see how the absence of the writer permits us to disregard all traces of her/his voice in the text. Yes, any sign can exist without the sender and/or receiver, but controllers at a Pan American Airways station might have saved Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan if they had known the signals they were picking up were coming from their plane!

A gardener in Papua New Guinea would say this meaning he had pulled a plant’s roots out of the ground. It is German and English mixed with Malay syntax and appropriate here because I am going to focus on the resisting subject in The Penal Colony. This form of Pidgin (Tok Pisin) is a creolization of language, which is a form of resistance against dominant discourse where subjects struggle with the power of the state for control of their bodies. They create a new language to claim space for themselves.

In Kafka’s tale, the nameless characters are products of various power structures that repress individual will. They have no agency because their subjectivity is created by the state. All their actions demonstrate that they are Althusser’s concrete subjects. The state apparatus inscribes the law on their bodies. Just as a harrow cultivates the land, Kafka’s harrow is history subjecting the body to violence in the construction of culture.

However, throughout the story there are signs that the system is flawed and resistance to power is always present.

The Condemned Man

The first sign of resistance to the Old Commandant’s order is the Condemned Man’s insubordination. Rather than begging forgiveness for his misdemeanor, he grabs his superior and shouts, “Throw away that whip or I’ll eat you up.” This mimicry of the master’s aggression reflects the barbarism of the state and demonstrates the individual’s non-compliance with the law.  Later, the condemned man dares to bend over the glass of the harrow, and the fact that he is chained and then must be strapped on to the bed of the Apparatus is a clear indication of the individual’s resistance to coercion.

Once in the bed, the Condemned is overcome by nausea and throws up so that the stump of felt can no longer silence him. His vomit flows into the machine.

Later, he uses signs to communicate with the soldier with whom he makes friends. When he sees the officer in the Apparatus, he smiles as he realizes that he will get his revenge. Finally, he tries to leave the island with the Traveler. All of these actions point to an individual’s resistance to power.

The Apparatus

Kafka’s machine of torture is a reflection of the State’s inability to completely control all subjects. Thus, the machine only “seems to do its work uniformly.” It squeaks creating a disturbance that infuriates the Officer who sees that it is still “not working properly.” In fact, the officer unwittingly admits to the failure of the system when he calls the tortured “martyrs.” The transfiguration on their faces brings to mind saints on burning pyres who refuse to give up their faith and just before death experience a transfiguration that only confirms their convictions. The condemned in the penal colony resist even while their sentences are being inscribed down to the very core of their bodies.

The Officer, on the other hand, does not require straps and cannot use the felt stump as he willingly submits to his torture and death. There isn’t even the slightest hum when the Officer is in it, perhaps because he, like Pontius Pilate, cannot wash his hands of his guilt. However, the machine self-destructs because it is torturing one of its own docile subjects. Paradoxically, the state as oppressive power can only function when it is suppressing individual will. In other words, where there is “guilt beyond a doubt” resistance is inevitable. (The imploding machine reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s imploding robots, which are unable to deal with the changeable nature of morality because they lack free will)

The Traveller

The Traveler recognizes the inhumanity that the Apparatus represents. He cannot decipher the language of the diagrams, but he is horrified by the implication of what he sees. He refuses to support the Officer, and although his decision not to stop the machine from killing the Officer points to his own subjectivity cultivated by another oppressive system, he bites his lip and says nothing. Why does Kafka add this detail? The biting of his lip indicates that he is holding something back. He is not completely without a conscience. Something is bubbling just under the surface. The reader is disappointed in his pathetic behaviour, and when he prevents the Soldier and Condemned Man from leaving the island with him, he appears to be a very callous individual. However, I would argue that the glimmer of conscience that keeps threatening to make itself heard is Kafka’s acknowledgement of the resisting voice that we may choose to stifle but that is, nevertheless, always there.

If citizens are products of a culture that controls them, why the need for the Apparatus?

Where there is power there is resistance, which is an expression of individual will.

As my Irish grandfather said to his children when they were not allowed to speak Gaelic and had to use English in school, “Bastardize de language baiy!”

So they would ask, “Verarugoin and vatarudoin?”

I haven’t slept much this week because first I learned that literature is dead, and then I read that ideology/consciousness is determined by material circumstances. Let me deal with the first nightmare.

Literature is dead! In another words, because we all act out of radical evil, literature along with its writers and readers no longer have anything honest (for lack of a better word) to say about being human. This claim, I feel, is itself an act of radical evil, for it silences the multitude of voices that continue to express themselves through the writing and reading of literature. I mean, how can anyone claim that the stories, testimonials, reflections of those whose discourse runs contrary to hegemonic discourse do not constitute literature? Who are we to silence them? Perhaps those in mourning are thinking of themselves as authors and readers who have lost interest in contributing to the conversation still generated by literature. Actually, I think people who lament the death of literature are deceiving themselves (dishonestly). Literature as language is a manifestation of the unconscious, so if it were dead we would be mute. However, we continue to speak honestly about what it means to be human, and the conversation continues.

Also, I would like to add that Kant did suggest that a conversion from radical evil acts to moral acts that coincide with our moral thoughts (moral as in for the greater good) is possible. There is redemption, not in the religious sense from a God or Being outside the self but through the   individual’s effort. This is as far as I got, but it seems to me that we are not doomed to a permanent state of radical evil, and there is literature out there that is ALIVE and KICKING!

Now to Althusser:

1. “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”  We rely on language to establish our reality so we are always victims of ideology: in other words, material conditions, or things, first and consciousness second.

Those who listened to the language of Gandhi, King or Sui Kyi were the victims of certain ideologies and found agency with another.

What about art? Surely there are works of art that reflect a myriad of hybrid thought systems that successfully challenge state ideologies.Where does individual human creativity fit? Are we creative because we are victims of ideology? What about the middle-class writer whose act of writing subverts dominant discourse?

What about the wealthy citizen giving up all vast wealth to work as a volunteer? Aren’t his or her actions a reflection of individual agency?

2. “Ideology has material existence.” Ideology manifests itself through actions that become practices.

What about all the actions that manifest numerous ideologies? In a pluralistic environment of competing ideologies there must arise vast grey areas where actions (of resistance) reflect an ever-evolving patchwork of consciousnesses!

3. “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.” 4. “Individuals are always already subjects.”

What about refugees born in a refugee camp and arriving in Victoria on a boat? What is their ideology? Who hails them and will they respond?  Whose subjects are they?

LACAN

The id is the signifier that emerges as language. So Lacan does not agree that things come before consciousness, or that things come first and language exists to name them.

No, “consciousness begins with the letter”. This means language is the signifier, which is always displaced from the object of desire. Like Saussure, Lacan believes that the bar between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and cannot be crossed. We are forever barred from what we desire and language can only function metonymically (Freud’s displacement) with an occasional wondrous metaphor (Freud’s condensation) popping up once in a while.

The object of desire can only be sensed as a lack that is occasionally manifested through metaphor. For example, a dove might mean peace.  We desire peace, or we sense that it is something desirable, but we don’t know what it is. The image of the dove only offers a fleeting glimpse of what we think we lack.

(The paradox is that these metaphors revel a momentary glimmer of what we desire when there is a certain amount of distance between the object of desire and the signifier)

So it seems that we can never be present to ourselves. We can never satisfy our desires because the signified, the object of desire is perpetually deferred.

Meaning is always out of reach, but that is how language creates the subject. Without the desire for the ever-elusive object, language would be unnecessary. If we could know the unconscious, language would never be needed. Language is necessary because only through conversation can we engage the unconscious and develop as human beings.

The conversation continues…

(This entry is very stream of layperson’s consciousness)

Dreams = manifestations of latent content i.e. the unconscious.

Speech = manifestation of language

Language = manifestation of the unconscious

Literature = what permits human beings to communicate with another consciousness and perhaps a collective unconscious?

I love this quote Freud used in The Interpretation of Dreams: “… a thousand threads one treadle throws,/ Where fly the shuttles hither and thither,/ Unseen the threads are knit together,/ And an infinite combination grows.” (Goethe, Faust)

However, I don’t believe that all those threads that make up the unconscious or dreams can ever be completely known, or even need be discovered. Perhaps interpretation is not what is important in art. Perhaps the effect its form has on the perceiver at the moment of its being perceived is. In other words, we can no more understand an object of art than we can know the unconscious.

The more theory I read, the more I realize that the search for definitions of what literature, an author and a reader are will never be found until we stop looking for some fixed “truth”. So far we think that literature is created through language, the human psyche of authors and readers, and the socio-economic climate of a historic moment. All these aspects of literature are in constant flux, so it seems to me that literature is simply a momentary expression of what it is to be human. It follows, therefore, that we are all authors and readers. We can all be artists, and we can all appreciate art. However, we have this word ‘art’, which is a term for what?

Regarding the human psyche, Freud’s analysis of dreams shows that dreams are a condensation and displacement of dream-thoughts. Also, he admits that it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation and that “some trains of thought may arise for the first time during analysis” of the dream. From this I gather that the manifest content of a dream comes from many sources all of which can never be identified, and that new thoughts can be associated with a dream even after its occurrence. Furthermore, Freud indicates that as all the sources of a dream are not represented by the dream, the condensation is created out of omission.

The dream then is a fragmentary version of the dream-thoughts as the subconscious must select the dream-thoughts that “have the most numerous and strongest supports.” (The repetition of elements is very interesting)

Dreams are a condensation brought about by omission = LITERATURE

Displacement in dreams means that text may be the same but it is given several or different meanings from the original = LITERATURE

Real and imaginary events have equal validity = LITERATURE

Repetition is important = LITERATURE

Fragmentation is key = LITERATURE

Confusion of time and space = LITERATURE

When applied to literature then, Freud’s theory fits very nicely with the idea of literature as langue. In other words, like meaning in dreams, meaning in literature has several sources that are condensed and displaced by the language of both the reader and author.

Problem:

 I find it difficult to see how Freud’s analysis of dreams can access dream-thoughts to arrive at an understanding of the way his patient’s mind works. The unconscious can only be inferred from the way consciousness operates because it is imperceptible. Also, he admits that his and his patient’s interpretations add new thoughts/meaning to the dream. Therefore, it is impossible to discover all the dream-thoughts on his “nodal points” to arrive at the truth behind a dream. Freud’s interpretation of dreams can never be definitive.

Consciousness never completely reveals what we want to say because behind it lurks the unconscious, which can never be known. Therefore, literature as language reveals only a fragment of the unconscious and can never reveal a single truth. It can only make us aware of another consciousness that somehow helps us to learn something about being human.

Marx argues that religion and literature have objective value and are determined by social, economic and historical factors. In other words, authors and their work are a product of the writer’s past and present and therefore literature does not deal with universal truths. What we know and how we know it is determined by factors outside the individual’s control. This means that what we read is contrived by dominant discourse to make us think in a certain way about both the world around us and ourselves. Consciousness then is another product that can be fabricated/labeled and consumed.

There is no author!

My question is where does the individual fit in? Is there no individual consciousness that has developed out of both public and private experience? Every human being’s interaction with the world is distinct, and we are able to choose how we process physical and mental stimuli. Literature is both social and personal.

What about literature that subverts hegemonic discourse? Where does that come from?

Also, I have a problem with his treatment of women in society. He argues for the abolishment of public and private prostitution, and recognizes that there has always been a community of women. However, would he give female individuals agency in society?

Perhaps less interpretation and more appreciation of the art form is in order.