Categories
introductions

What is Theory? / Personal Questions about the Writing Process

Hello everyone,

My name is Gabriela (you can call me Gabby if Gabriela is too long, most people do!) Badica and I am in my second year of my Master’s degree in Hispanic Studies. I also completed my B.A. at UBC with a double major in English Literature and Spanish. I had a little bit of exposure to literary theory in some of my English Lit classes, although I never took a course on “just theory” (if that concept can even be so strictly classified or discerned). The most common format of my 300- and 400- level English classes was a combination of novels and theoretical texts (for example, reading Judith Butler in Science Fiction studies alongside different novels).

I am looking forward to this course and I really liked the discussion that we started yesterday about the integration of theory into student papers because this a concept that I have been grappling with for some time, especially since starting my Master’s degree and presenting in the Spanish seminar. Our discussion about how we often try to superimpose theory into a paper just because we think we should have it as a framework was really interesting to me because in my personal writing process, I tend to think of the theoretical texts and works of fiction the way I would if I were writing a comparative paper on two different novels; that is simply the way it comes to me. Perhaps this is because I wrote one too many comparative papers when I was doing my English Lit degree and I have come to really enjoy that type of paper, or perhaps it is because I think both the theoretical text and the work of fiction occupy the same plane when it comes to importance in a paper and I cannot envision one as more important than the other. This is a tension that is present in all of my recent papers and I greatly look forward to this class because I think it will be a challenging and safe space where I can work out that question for myself while, of course, having the support of my peers and professors as we move forward in this process together.

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Categories
introductions

Why do we need to write?

Big debate in class about the necessity of this blog… why do we need to participate on line?

Once upon a time, indeed, writing was seen by Plato/Socrates as a new technology threatening the love of knowledge i.e., philosophy. Because according to the philosophers, there was only one way to express one’s thought and keep the thinking alive: the speech, in the shape of a dialogue, that was the philosophical debate. (http://www.gradesaver.com/phaedrus/study-guide/section10/)

And now, blogging could well be the new threatening technology preventing us from communicating… so why should we blog?

Maybe because

1. the professors asked us to :P

2. we don’t want to be seen as old conservative Greek philosophers (too beardy)

3. the elders call us the generation Ipad…let’s pretend we know what it means!

4. most of all, maybe, because when the thinkers were criticizing writing, they were afraid of losing the vivid spirit of discussion, arguing, agreeing, disagreeing, and together looking for the answer…an answer…

BECAUSE, if Theory is a question…let’s question together!

Any disagreeing comment is more than welcome !


Categories
introductions

Expectations for the class

My name is Bruno Nassi. I am from Lima, Peru. I did my undergraduate studies in Hispanic Literature and now I am in the M.A. of Hispanic Studies at UBC. I have special interest for the “Boom” of the Latin American Literature, his origins, development and subsequent movements. Also, I am interested in studying how is represented the image of woman in Latin American Literature and Culture. I think that since the time that Colon and Vespucci arrived to Latin America, a colonized and distorted image has been built.

My course expectations are to expand and review my knowledge in Literary and Cultural Theory. The knowledge that I will acquire in the course, will provide me with important tools to approach and analyze the research interests that I have mentioned above. For instance, Postcolonial and Gender theories could articulate my investigation in the construction of the stereotype of women in Latin America.

I think also, that the XX century has been convulsed not only by its historical events, but for the many changes in the way that we perceive Literature, Culture and, of course, the world itself. Undoubtedly, Literary and Critical Theory is an important guideline to understand this diversified scenario. In that sense, another important expectation that I have is to get a perspective in how the XX century has molded different approaches to Literature, Culture and life. I think that multiple perspectives enrich and help to create an own perspective.

In short, my expectations are to have more tools to use in my investigations and analysis, as well as have a better understanding of the development of the intellectual ideas of the XX century, that certainly are the base of our times.

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hen

Guy de Maupassant’s “Toine” is (much like “The Little Cask”) something of a parable of economic theory.

Toine, the eponymous innkeeper, is the very model of productive consumption. He is the biggest fan of his own product: the cognac that he calls “extra-special,” which he declares to be “the best in France.” His zealous praise of his own produce gives him his nickname, “Toine-My-Extra-Special,” and his loquacity and cheeriness draw customers from miles around, “for fat Toine would make a tombstone laugh.”

But what makes him special (and presumably what makes him cheery) is also his prodigious appetite, which is itself a marvel for visitors to this out-of-the-way hamlet, sheltered in a ravine from the ocean winds: “merely to see him drink was a curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him.”

This consumption, however, is not simply wasteful or a drain on his resources. It is in fact what makes his business profitable. Consumption and acquisition are happily mixed in Toine’s gregarious nature: “His was a double pleasure: first, that of drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash.”

Toine is a poster boy for profitable sybaritism. He is a living rejoinder to miserliness on the one hand, and the Protestant work ethic on the other.

And this is surely what irks his wife. She is angered by the fact that her husband “earned his money without working.” The story’s narrative, then, is devoted to her efforts to turn him into something more like a laborer: to reap profit not from his consumption but from a more stringent (and more morally acceptable) program of regimentation and discipline.

So she makes Toine into a broody hen.

Laid up after an apoplectic fit (the fruit of his excessive enjoyment, though it hardly slows him down: he sets up a regular domino game by his bedside and he would still “have made the devil himself laugh”), Toine is forced to keep his wife’s chickens’ eggs warm. For the long, anxious gestation season, his movements are even more radically restricted: he can no longer turn to left or right, for fear of “plunging him[self] into the midst of an omelette.”

As time goes by, Toine, whom his wife has long regarded as more beast than man (“You’d be better in the sty with along with the pigs!”) comes more and more to identify with the animal kingdom. There’s something almost Kafkaesque about his gradual metamorphosis, if not into a pestilent cockroach but into a mother hen. His arms become like wings, under which his precious charges shelter.

And becoming animal is also (here at least) a becoming feminine: he manifests “the anguish of a woman who is about to become a mother.” No wonder that his is an “unusual sort of paternity” as he is transformed into “a remarkable specimen of humanity.”

But the story is not so much about Toine’s gradual animalization, and more about simply his increasing recognition of his animal status. For Maupassant treats all his characters as, frankly, beasts: Toine’s wife “walked with long steps like a stork, and had a head resembling that of a screech-owl”; his friend Prosper, whose idea the entire stratagem is, has “a ferret nose” and is “cunning as a fox.” Another friend is if anything less human still: he is “somewhat gnarled, like the trunk of an apple-tree.”

So perhaps Maupassant’s final word is that, whichever economic regime they favour, and whether they choose the moral virtue of restraint or the sybaritic pleasures of unlicensed consumption, in the end all of his characters are animals. Either way, what you have are simply various modalities of affective labor. It’s just that some are more in tune with this realization than others.

Categories
Bourdieu

Lakoff

In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things George Lakoff argues: first, that emotions are concepts, that they do a form of cognitive work and constitute “an extremely complex conceptual structure” (380); and, second, that these “emotional concepts are embodied, that is, that the actual content of the concepts are correlated with bodily experience” (408).

To prove his argument, he presents dozens of idiomatic sayings or expressions, taking the particular case of anger. Anger, he shows, is conventionally associated with heat (“hot under the collar,” “hot and bothered”), pressure (“burst a blood vessel”), and agitation (“hopping mad,” “quivering with rage”). Such idioms correlate, Lakoff suggests, with a “folk theory” that imagines anger in terms of a contained liquied, an imaginary that enables a whole series of “metaphorical entailments” (384). So anger produces steam (“all steamed up”), can at least temporarily be held back (“bottled up”), but, if it does not find relief (either “vented” or “channeled”) is liable to lead to explosion (“flipping her lid,” “blowing his top”).

Lakoff goes further: he presents a sort of basic narrative of anger in terms of this metaphorical structure. An offending event excites anger, which the victim of the event fist tries to control but then fails, until he or she can enact some retribution for the purported wrong-doing (397-98). This is the embodied folk theory of anger.

Where Lakoff goes out on a limb, however, is with his claim that “the conceptual metaphors and metonymies used in anger are by no means arbitrary; instead they are motivated by our physiology” (407). If we think through the body, it is because somehow the body knows best; the verbal idioms and linguistic categories through which we understand emotion in common parlance are rooted in a primary corporeal experience that is transcultural and transhistorical: “if we look at metaphors and metonymies for anger in the languages of the world, we will not find any that contradict the physiological results” (407).

It is therefore all the more startling that Lakoff moves immediately to a discussion, in very similar terms, of idioms of lust and ultimately the language used to justify rape. Though he is careful to note that he himself in no way condones violence against women, he seems very close to naturalizing and so legitimating the fundamentally sexist “folk argumentation” that claims that (in his words) “a woman with a sexy appearance makes a man who is acting morally less than human. [. . .] To be made less than human is to be injured. [. . .] The only way to make up for being injured is to inflict and injury of the same kind” (414).

If language is only an expression of a somehow more fundamental set of embodied concepts, then those concepts are put beyond reach and thoroughly naturalized. It is surely better to see the body as an always contested (or contestable) point of contact between conceptual schemes of diverse origin, between affect and emotion, and between a social order and a corporeal experience that is never anything other than social. The body, in short, is the site of a habituation whereby (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) an arbitrary symbolic power is made, quite literally, to feel timeless and necessary.

Bourdieu tries to capture this notion with the concept of “bodily hexis, which he defines as “a political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 92-94). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, in an only very slightly different context:

The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated that are triggered by the magic of symbolic power and through which the dominated, often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed, often take the form of bodily emotions–shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guild–or passions and sentiments–love, admiration, respect. (Masculine Domination 38)

The very fact that we seem to be betrayed by our own bodies, by a logic that precedes or undercuts rationality, can seem to legitimate the structures of power that the body thereby apparently confirms. But it is what Slavoj Zizek, in turn, would call the ideological structure of social reality (which is far from ideology as it is usually conceived) that has itself to be interrogated and overthrown.

Categories
Deleuze Zholkovsky

Deus

Alexandr Zholkovkii’s short essay “Deus ex Machina” does not, rather fortunately, succumb so swiftly to the strange (and strikingly out of place) Romanticism that characterizes so many of the other texts that outline what he terms a “poetics of expressiveness”. Here, instead of praise for the accomplished and inspired author and his or her techniques for better self-expression, his focus is on the literary machine itself and its autonomic tendencies.

Zholkovkii’s thesis, he tells us, is that “any artistic text is a machine working on the reader: a ‘machine’ not only in the figurative sense, but in the strictly cybernetic sense as well–as a transforming device” (53). Soon enough, however, this definition has to be extended: there is no special privilege to the artistic text; all cultural productions and practices obey a machinic logic that amplifies, distorts, modulates, or transforms a whole series of inputs, often in unpredictable ways. Social and legal conventions, for instance, ensure that a contract is fulfilled (in one example that Zhlkovskii provides) even when one of the parties to the contract has, unknown to the other, suddenly died. Events have a logic of their own, that goes beyond individual agents. Plot consists in precisely such machinic logic that overtakes and determines the fate of individual characters.

In Zholkovskii’s vision, every instance of a literary, artistic, or social machine still requires some kind of external input: the machines do not run by themselves. This is the residual trace of the notion of “expressiveness”: the machinery is ultimately a form of expression. But the mechanism that enables such expression tends to become so dominant that individuals are soon subjected to the machine rather than its subject: Zolkovskii mentions the famous scene, for instance, in Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin is physically “dragged into an assembly line” (57). “One is, of course, tempted” he therefore observes, “to think of a machine that would alone do all the plot work” (59).

A machine without some kind of prior input, however, is unimaginable: the whole formula of expressiveness would disappear and “such a machine would [. . .] completely replace and thus cancel the plot” (59); such a perpetual motion machine, that strictly followed its own logic and no other, would be the end of art and culture. The machine needs an external God, a supplement of some kind, to ensures that there is indeed God also in the machine itself. Zholkovkii’s Romanticism never quite disappears, though here we see its limit point.

But what if there were nothing but machines? Or at least, other inputs that were not themselves already human. This, of course, is the provocative opening of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines–real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. (1)

This would be a machine that, like Athusser’s “hailing machine,” produced subjects (rather than being driven by them), though also so much else. Indeed, the subject might be perhaps the least interesting of its many products. And if a God remained in the mechanism, it would be immanent, fully part of the machine rather than the mere trace of some transcendent vision.

Meanwhile, I’ve written elsewhere on the machinic unconscious of literary texts: “Arguedasmachine”.

Categories
Barthes

myth

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes takes up the challenge posed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics: to elaborate “semiology” as what Saussure terms “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life” (15). Or to put this another way: Barthes takes the world around him as a social text, which can be read more or less like any other and in which the elements that compose it are almost as arbitrary as any other.

But the social text is only almost as arbitrary as any other; for Barthes, we also need “to pass from semiology to ideology” (128), that is, to recognize that the myths that structure the text of everyday life are politically motivated. To adapt a line from Marx: the ruling myths of each age have ever been the myths of its ruling class. There is therefore often a rather complex play between arbitrariness on one level and necessity (or, at least, political motivation) on another.

Wine is a perfect instance of this combination of extreme malleability and narrow determination. As Barthes observes, in France wine “supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions” (58). For example, “in cold weather it is associated with all the myths of being warm, and at the height of summer, with all the images of shade, with all things cool and sparkling” (60). Indeed, Barthes notes that the fundamental characteristic of wine as a signifier is less any particular content or signified to which it is attached than that it seems to effect a function of conversion or reversal, “extracting from objects their opposites–for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative” (58). And yet however much Barthes makes hay of this chain of associations and contradictions, there is a point at which the arbitrary play of significations ends. For wine is still, fundamentally, a commodity; in fact, it is big business. The analysis therefore concludes with a sort of determination in the last instance by the economy:

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation. (61)

Hence for this reason, if no other, Barthes is far from suggesting some kind of interpretative free play: there is clearly a right way to read the myth of wine, and a wrong way; if we leave out the fact of expropriation, we have ultimately not understood the myth or its social function.

Elsewhere the moment at which interpretation comes to an end is rather more complex, and perhaps more interesting. Take the essay on “Toys.” This is basically a critique of realism. Let us be clear: the problem with conventional French toys, Barthes argues, is not so much that they are gender-stereotyped, that for instance girls are to play with dolls and boys are given toy soldiers. It is, rather, that toys are almost always loaded with meaning: “French toys >always mean something, and this something is almost always entirely socialized” (53).

Toys constitute, in other words, what Barthes elsewhere terms a “work” in contradistinction to a “text”; they limit the range of uses to which they can be put. Indeed, they limit children’s activity and expectation of the world to one predicated on use, rather than pleasure; on interpretation, rather than creation. And for Barthes use and meaning are both forms of tyranny, and they are both essentially dead. As he says of modern toys that are “chemical in substance and colour,” they “die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child” (55).

What’s curious, however, is the reading that Barthes provides, by contrast, of wooden blocks. Such toys are closer to a text than a work: they have no pre-set meaning; they are not premised upon representation, and so do not depend upon interpretation; the child who plays with them “creates life, not property” (54). So far, so good. But the strange moment comes when Barthes associates the open textuality facilitated by such open-ended play with wood. In a sort of poetic reverie, he praises the many characteristics of a substance that is “an ideal material because of its firmness and softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal” (54).

It’s not obvious, after all, that wood is any more “natural” (or indeed, any less “chemical”) than metal. Here, the point at which the play of signification stops depends less upon a political analysis of exploitation and expropriation, and rather more on a very familiar contrast between nature and industry, tradition and modernity. In short, here at least Barthes seems to be caught in a myth that he has merely made his own.

Categories
Marxism

destruction

[From my prologue to Rodrigo Naranjo, Para desarmar la narrative maestra: Un ensayo sobre la Guerra del Pacífico.]

“Creative Destruction: Ruins, Narrative, and Commonality”

Marx and Engels long ago noted that capitalist productivity entails unceasing destruction and destitution. As they put it in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” (38). Destruction is not a mere by-product of capitalist development; it is its fundamental pre-requisite as the formal subsumption of labor, whereby older technologies are maintained even as they are assimilated into capitalist relations, is replaced by real subsumption, which demands the fundamental transformation of all aspects of the productive process. But as a result, capitalism is also truly revolutionary: it abruptly does away with the hierarchies and injustices of earlier social formations, if only to replace them with a regime that is even more insidiously unequal and unjust. Ruins of the past may persist: more or less mute reminders of what has gone before, but these too are often enough caught up in the revolutionary whirlwind. If capital can profit from the ruins it creates, it does so, turning them for instance into historical theme-parks, sites for leisure or aesthetic contemplation. Ruined places and peoples can be treated with a certain exoticizing sympathy, at the same time as they are held up as object (and objectified) lesson in what happens to those who do not adapt fast enough to changing times. In short, they can be resignified as part of a master narrative of progress. More often, however, capital moves swiftly on, brutally unsentimental about the devastation it leaves in its wake. Still, there is something strangely creative about the destruction wrought by capitalist modernity, a fact analyzed by theorists from Werner Sombart to Joseph Schumpeter.

Some have celebrated capital’s tendency to build on ruins, seeing it in Darwinian terms as an instance of the survival of the fittest. As Schumpeter argues, “the essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process” (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy 82). Others have been more ambivalent or even downright critical. Recently, Naomi Klein has revived the notion of creative destruction with her observations in The Shock Doctrine, but with a twist. For Klein, catastrophe is not so much endemic to capitalism as a necessary supplement for the particular hyper-capitalist ethos that goes by the name of neoliberalism. What she terms “disaster capitalism” arises in the twentieth century with the Pinochet dictatorship, only then to spread around the world. Klein argues that the successful implementation of neoliberal “reforms” depends upon a catastrophic “shock,” whether that be imposed from above (as in Chile) or whether it be an apparent “Act of God” (such as Hurricane Katrina) from which capital can opportunistically profit. In this version, it is not capitalism on its own that engineers the destruction upon which its creativity depends: some external force or sovereign violence intervenes to pave the way for economic restructuring, which is in turn devastating in its own way. But the shock comes first: the political has priority, and contemporary capitalism is rather more Leninist that its proponents would like to believe.

For Marx and Engels, the effects of capitalism’s creative destruction are epistemological as much as they are social, political, or economic. “All that is solid melts into air,” as they famously observe, “all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind” (38-39). Intrinsic or extrinsic to capitalist production, it is crisis that allows us to see the truth of bourgeois society–and perhaps the preconditions of any society–clearly for the first time. The continual catastrophes that mark modernity allow an opening to capital’s posthegemonic kernel: every trace of ideology is swept away. Indeed, all narratives are briefly disrupted and we are left with a glimpse of what Giorgio Agamben would call bare life. Not only therefore does creative destruction do away with the oppressive social structures of the past: for all the neoliberal dictum that in the face of disaster “there is no alternative” to free-market deregulation, it also suggests that capitalism may not be the only beneficiary of the very crises that it lives and breathes. Catastrophe offers a turning point. It provides space for the rearticulation of well-worn mantras, which may gain renewed purchase when our defenses have been downed. It may also subsequently provide a mythic origin for new narratives and new articulations, perhaps more sinister than hitherto. But further, crisis has the potential to allow something genuinely unheralded (if perhaps long felt) to emerge: in laying bare what Marx and Engels term man’s “relations with his kind,” it reveals what we have in common. However much it hits some more than others, the propensity to be touched by calamity is ultimately a condition that we have in common with others. Moreover, disaster tends to exert a brute levelling, to provoke shared affects and induce fellowship. So as Rebecca Solnit argues, “extraordinary communities” are built on the very ordinary experience of common practices and habits that emerge out of destruction.

Read more… (.pdf file)

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