El sur

Juan Dahlman, the main character of Jorge Luis Borges’ El sur, is a character that lives within fantasy; within the fantasy of literature in general but particularly Argentine literature. (I will come back to the Argentine literature.) He lives surrounded by books. He works as a secretary in a municipal library and, not very surprisingly, reads a lot. Literature is his life, and also his death. But how is it his death? Does he die? The story as a whole plays with the reader’s (Juan’s, the nations, etc.) perception of reality and dream/fantasy/fiction. Is it clear that Juan Dahlman left the hospital after a supposed recovery? Is his thinking clear? Does he live a fantasy? Does it matter? These are questions that arise due to the play with perception: reality and fiction. The play although is to realize that there is no difference. The reality one lives is really a fiction; a constructed reality. They are one and the same; and they are equally as dangerous. It is dangerous if one forgets this; in regards to this Borges writes, “Though blind to guilt, fate can be merciless with the slightest distraction.” The study of language has shown us that meanings, signs, history are a construction and the human community has done the constructing. Lacan told us that we become subjects of language (which is makes up the human community) the minute we are named. In Dahlman’s case, what is he a subject of? He is the subject of the fiction of Argentina. Moreover, he is a subject of Argentine literature.

His Argentinity is produced by the story of his maternal grandfather. The events in his story in turn are the events that helped win and ‘civilize’ the Argentine nation. It marks the suffering and sacrifice that it took to build it. It takes the place of a void that exists in Argentina’s nationness. This void is shown in the first line of the story: “The man that stepped off the boat.” Argentina has no origin. Then we have the presence Martin Fierro. This is a poem sung by a ‘gaucho’. In the process of civilizing the country, along with the natives, this ‘gaucho’ is a figure, mestizo in many cases, which was wiped out, killed, or otherwise made to assimilate to the de new nation. Undoubtedly, this figure is also a part of that void, and it is a part of the new origin. The South, la pampa is a place that is disjointed with the city, which is really the nation. It is this disjoining that the national literature helped create. The ending tells us that the danger in the South is still there, or that it is a creation of Dahlman’s delirium at the hospital or romanticized fiction of his death.

What is an Author?

In his essay What is an Author? Michele Foucault makes a direct reference to, although this is probably more than a reference but rather a reading of, Roland Barthes famous essay Death of the Author. It seems to me that what Foucault undertakes in this text is essentially a deconstruction of the ‘death of the author’. He is in principle not questioning or saying the proposition by Barthes or other critics and philosopher as he says are wrong or inadequate, but rather saying that reality proves that we are far from a real death or disappearance of the author; at least theoretically one cannot subtract him from the study of the text because the author has leaves traces in it that are inescapable at the time of critique. Perhaps the author is dead or has died, and our trying to find THE meaning of the text within him can stop, but not his specter, at least this is how I understood this. This specter is what Foucault calls the author function. Before his death, the author needs to be defined and from that perhaps a horizon for the real death can be seen or hypothesized. This ‘author function’ basically transcends the ideas ‘the death of the author’ and the notions by witch this was signified.

As I read this I thought again of what it is to leave out who the author of a particular text is and thought that when we look at the form of a text, we are looking at the arrangement that someone made. The ‘montage’ that they are making with, yes, as Foucault and the other philosophers think, words and discourses that they did not invent. For instance, the paratextual signs that are included in a novel or a book; for instance the tittle makes reference to someone’s choosing, that, at least as I see it, was the authors, cold be the editors, doing. If an editor changes a tittle we will criticize him for ‘altering’ the original text. This questions his authority and places it into the real author. Another point I thought of was that a narrative will have a ‘narrator’ or a poem a ‘poetic voice’. This device has an author function. Perhaps the author is not one which holds the meaning of a text of literature but just one that arranged the language in a way that we find interesting to study. (Lazarillo de Tormes: why have researchers and critics tried so hard to find out who its author is?)

Orientalism

Edward Said’s book Orientalism is an interesting study of knowledge as power. He situates the knowledge the West has about the Orient as that which intrinsically expresses a hierarchy; a division. The division itself, of the naming, west/east, occident/orient, is allowing the possibility of difference, hence hierarchy; and hegemony as Said demonstrates. The parts of these binaries are charged, or packed, with different connotations or meanings that will be interpreted as us vs. them. The interesting part as Said points out, is that all of these connotations are a mere construction, even that of the west itself. Itself… This concept is of importance. In the history of the relations between west and east nothing stands as a symbol of equality. These two geographical areas are not on equal terms; one stands higher than the other. Said traces the instances of colonization of the Orient by the West and says that in the later there is also a correlative undertaking in culture. He gets to the position that acknowledges a reciprocal feeding of interpretations of the Orient, between the political discourse and the cultural discourse. Itself… or rather just ‘self’. Who’s self? The West’s self. At the heart of the practice of Orientalism there is a construction more of this self than that of the other. According to Said Orientalism tells us very little about the Orient, it rather tells us about occident. So what is known about the other is constructed, it is fictionalized, to legitimize the construction of ourselves, the West, and legitimize our superiority, our legitimate and godly power over the East. So knowledge about someone can give you power over them; knowing them better than they know themselves is the key to maintaining hegemony over a region or a certain people.

Cultural hegemony is basically how Said is pointing out the overall project of western culture and its creation of Orientalism. He says that the Orient is not just a simple fantasy but rather a reality in western culture. That is to say, the fiction, or fantasy as Said calls it, is not experienced as unreal but as reality; perceived as the reality of the Orient. Said points this out very precisely with his example of the French journalist that references his knowledge of the Orient to Chateaubriand and Nerval as the real Orient instead of what he was seeing and living himself.   So, when cultural hegemony has been consolidated, political domination will be an easy task.

What is good? Does it exist?

At first, I thought that Flannery O’Conner’s short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find was about decadence; decadence of a region of the United States, of the whole country, of a society, of a religion. I had thought the grandmother was a noble being, and that she was hated, that she was treated like a pest, by the new generations, the young, her own son and grandchildren. I saw the young as leaving behind, as disposing of the values, as destroying the heritage that was what made a good society, family, and individual people of them. The tittle of the story resonated very much with most of the male characters that in some way or another can be considered as ‘not good’; this bringing questions of gender critique into discussion. The son is not good because he doesn’t treat his mother with respect and neither does the grandson; there are the two individuals that con the gasman, and, of course, there is The Misfit and his gang. The gasman is interesting because he thinks that by saying that a good man is hard to find, that he is a good man; that because he got conned he is a good man; because he is a veteran he is a good man; because he is aligned with the grandmother and her time, her generation, her values, maybe even her class, he is a good man. So, a ‘good man’ is hard to find in these decadent days; these decadent days where there is no longer any pride for your land, for your state, or for your country. Even the language of the story is ordinary; it is decadent.

But then I read the story again. The discussion about Jesus, the ending, and the definition for the Misfit’s name made me rethink if there actually was a critique of new society, a love for The South, and discourse of decadence. The Misfit throws everything in this southern United States cosmos, and national cosmos overall, off balance. He says of his name, “I call myself The Misfit because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.” This here alone proposes that there never has been any justification for the amount of punishment that he has gone through given the ‘crimes’ he had committed, if he had committed any crimes at all. He creates his name so he can have a signature, so he can have ‘his papers’, which are his proof. (Note: he does not create his name to describe himself as a Misfit of society.) He had been accused of killing his father but he says he doesn’t remember doing it; implying that he originally was innocent. But ‘they’ had the papers; and they never showed them to him. This leads to another one of his explanations. He says that if Jesus raised the dead then there would be nothing but to follow him. This brings the holy scripture (or holy papers for the purpose of this story), the bible, into reference for good subsequent behavior by man. Then he says that if he did not raise the dead then then one should go on killing and committing other aggressions. This moment now is crucial, when the grandmother says that maybe Jesus didn’t raise the dead. (We should note that authorship and truth are put into question here. The Misfit says he wasn’t there to see if Jesus did raise the dead, that he cannot trust a paper to be telling the truth, just as the papers they had on him were not telling the truth. He has his signature that he will leave at the scene of the crimes he committed; so that he is not over punished if he gets caught.) This moment was the turning point in the unraveling of my initial reading. This raises some questions: How can you find a good man if good never existed? How can a society be in decadence if it never was in an ascent? Where are you going to find good where only evil has existed? How can you define ‘good’ in this atmosphere? Truth is separated from non-truth. The grandmother’s subsequent change in attitude towards the Misfit, when she says that he is one of her children, illustrates her realization that her imagination of the past, her religiously preconceived notions of ‘good’ and what society is, are shattered. She sees the truth of life, of her country, of her state. The fiction clashes with the reality. There is a breaking of the simulacrum, the hyper-real that is trying to be lived. The old are no different than the new.

The grandma portrays a character that is trying to maintaining a benevolent imaginary of the past, of the past that maintained certain relations of property, a conservative fiction (the expression ‘the gold old times’ could be remembered here), but that conflict with the new situation, the new times. The old relations of property in this context (let’s remember her dream of the plantation which in itself is reference to slavery and ownership of Africans) denote many situations which were beneficial to that imaginary, that upheld certain values that indeed were, at the very least, questionable.

It turns out that the grandma is not a very good person; that her values are not very good or they were wrong. Let’s remember her obsession with being a lady (even if they were to have a terrible car accident) and her pressing The Misfit that ‘he wouldn’t shoot a lady’; she has ‘connections’ and not friends; she thinks the world is the United States or maybe just the Southern states; Europe is to blame for the loss of better times; she said she wouldn’t take her children anywhere dangerous and then she was the one that wanted to go see the house (she lied to the kids about the house so they would convince their father to go) and ultimately she did not say that they should turn back when she realized that it was the wrong place. The accident was no accident as the kids were yelling out in capital letters. Let’s remember although that she’s not the only bad one. The new are bad too. They are also wrong. They also live inconsistent lives (we should remember the granddaughter’s remark about painting the little black kids life that didn’t have what they did). Their irrationality is shown by the uppercase letters of the word THEY when the kids are trying to convince their father of going to see the house. The lady became good when she was about to die; when she was on her death bed she realized her mistakes. What then can be considered a good man? The one that tells and acts the truth? Or, does a good man need to be found? What about a woman? How hard is it to find a good woman? Does she have to be faced with death every minute of her life? But that’s no real pleasure in life.

Judith Butler

I understand in Butler’s essay Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion how ‘gender is burning’ (through her look into the film Paris is Burning). This means to me that gender over all, is a construction; or a ‘fiction’ as is sustained towards the end of the essay. Furthermore, this means that there is no ‘true’ gender. The widely accepted notion that heterosexuality, and the gender identities, binary, it implies, is shattered, it is invalidated. Here then Butler presents the notion of hegemony to the category of gender. Here, there are all sort different divisions that become problematic. There is the masculine and there is the feminine; there is the white and there is the colored; there is the poor and there is the rich. This is very complex and it can certainly lead to, as Butler asserts, “constructions that belong to larger hegemonies of oppression,” in dismissal of the simplistic critique of ‘black male misogyny’ as was written in a critique made of the film. The problems presented in the film are indeed much bigger than just the problem of it portraying black male misogyny; or maybe not even reducible to that. This is where I have some doubts on Butler’s position on the ‘subversive’ aspect of the identity representations in the film. Perhaps I don’t have a problem with the notion of being rebellious, but I do with the explicit use of the notion of being subversive.

The represented identity may be subversion of a social norm, or more precisely a gender norm, but it loses all subversive intensity when it has been appropriated by the market, capitalist, system. Then it is normalized, but it has not affected the social conditions that are more pressing than gender identity (or at least the conditions that affect even the existence of such cultural formations represented in the film), the conditions that the capitalist system (society) is not willing, not able, to change, due to its nature of existence, which are that of poverty, domination, repression, exploitation, and others.  Then it follows this appropriation/democratic subversion->Appropriation (Normalizing/defeated subversive). This is very explicit in the film: everyone’s desire to be a star. But there also is explicit in the film, which Butler (or the Hooks, whom she criticizes) something of the real problem: there is a character in the film that states that the real dominating condition is their economic situation; he/she says that if they had millions of dollars they would share with everyone they know to alleviate their poverty hardship (At least remember having heard it at some point in the film in that way). I’m not saying that if this happened, all the social problems would be solved; that is not true either. What I think is that the film exposes, yes gender matters, but much more pressing issues that correspond to a universal situation and not just the particular instance of black/latino gay men.

bell hooks

The tittle to bell hooks’ essay Is Paris Burning? says a lot about the character of the essay. It is obviously making reference to the tittle of Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning, which is the focus and object of a very strong critique. Turning the documentaries tittle into a question has many effects. One effect is to question the overall project of the documentary. This documentary shows (exposes) the underground (is it redundant to say underground in this context?) drag culture of homosexual men in New York; more specifically of black and latino men. The life of these homosexual, outcasts most of them, is centered on the important events known as balls. These are competitions where the competitors try to be the best imitators of a certain fashion or social identity; most notably of women. Now there is glamour in this event and a remaking, or again imitating, of fashion presentation walk ways. The competitors walk and model their clothing, their appearance, their style, their makeup, and the work they put into their overall look. It basically is an imitation of high fashion, high culture trend and identity setting; hence the reference to the French city of Paris. But in this tittle, an affirmation, why is Paris burning? Because there is a satire of the fashion and glamour activity that takes place in Paris. The activities of these homosexuals, which is very much counter to the high class culture of Paris, makes a mockery of said high class culture and maybe even of the conditions that allow that high class cultural practice to take place. These obscure and low culture activity will make Paris burn with rage for the mockery that is made, by these racially subaltern homosexual men, of their highly cherished fashion and identity. So hooks questions this project. Has the documentary effectively made a critique (which is what a satire is) to that highly structured and exclusive world Parisian fashion and by extension to high class culture as well? Hooks thinks not. Hooks on the contrary, feels that film is in fact a mockery of black gay men, black identity overall, and even, most important to a feminist hooks, a mockery and further repression of the black woman. Even though hooks’ critique of the film is lacking in some areas, there are others that touch on very important points. The tittle in hooks’ essay is the first sign of a heavy critique to the film, but also a misreading of ‘why’ Paris would be burning.

Walter Benjamin

When I hear the word apparatus in a text I suddenly get interested. “The apparatus!” It sounds imposing. It is actually. In the Kafka story we read a few weeks ago, that word is in the first line. And we saw what that apparatus ultimately was meant to do and actually made happen: it inscribes language deep into the tissue, but interesting, not into the tissue of who is being inscribed upon, rather than who is watching, or reading; it also represses, dominates, kills, the body. We also saw this word in Althuser. He called them the Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses. These, just like in Kafka, serve the function of a sort of molding, manipulating, and keeping in place, in running order. The ultimate function of these is restricting the body, limiting its possible bodily actions; it is a restriction and harboring of its natural destructive force. When the ideas (the ISA in Althuser), unnoticed mental rules, that are imposed (educate), that are meant to impose, do not actually have an effect on a given subject (body), then the repressive arm (the RSA) is sent in to physically handle the disorder. Walter Benjamin also uses this word in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” He uses the word in reference to the camera. The camera is that for witch the actor is performing. The camera is a technological artifact. It is one of the materials that will impulse and facilitate the technological reproducibility. It will reproduce artificiality; a manipulation of the performance as opposed to the stage actor in a play. It is interesting then, the sort of appropriation that technology can assume. That apparatus has consumed the human, the body. The human dances not to entertain other humans but the camera; the camera (and the microphone) is that which requires the human to move. The camera therefore alters him; makes him use his body and feel in ways he wouldn’t otherwise. But then there is other end of that apparatus. It also captures who is viewing. The television! That is the other apparatus. (In Benjamin’s days this was probably less so.) Or is it the same one? I think both devises are part of the same apparatus. It is as Benjamin suggests, it demands a payment in “human material”. The apparatus here, just as in Kafka or Althuser appear to demand this, payment in “human material.”

J.L. Austin

Just the title of J.L. Austin’s work, one of this week’s readings, is already saying something of the project which will be undertaken in the text to follow. The title is “How to Do Things with Words.” With this title I start thinking of a type of map; that is to say, that there is a map or a chart of words and what they will materially produce. In essence, what I am trying to say is that there is a physical, a material aspect, or result, of using a word; in a valid atmosphere of course; and Austin is going to divulge this information because this is not in general know. If we can ‘do’ things with words, there is a certain materiality to them; they are tangible. If there is something material than there is a bond, a direct link that presupposes no change or a possible dissociation. There is a right and wrong way of doing the ‘things’ with words. The wrong way is cast out of any proper value because it does not follow the rules, the right way, or the ‘truth’; the referent.

The theory he develops is, at least the way I see it, and perhaps a bit condition by what I understood in Derrida’s critique (I will not discuss this here), more or less how I just explained my view of the title. The big word in this article, excerpt of his book, is “performative”. He describes performative utterances, and their validity, as being conditioned by material conditions outside of the words. ‘I write’ is valid right now because I am performing the act of writing. I n this case I have had a successful performative act. If am speaking to a friend and say, “Yeah, I write,” I have had an unsuccessful performative act, according to Austin that utterance cannot be described as ‘saying anything’; it is a misfired performative act. There are certain infelicities affecting the assertion to my friend. If a judge declares me ‘guilty’ inside of a court room there is no question of whether that is true or false: there is only one outcome, that that was a successful performative utterance because everything material to it happened in the way it was supposed to. If the same judge judges me on the street, and says ‘You’re guilty’, there has been, again, an unsuccessful performative act. But there is also the possibility that a friend of mine says ‘You’re guilty’, and like a judge, slams a gavel. This is a parasitic event on language. This is outside of ordinary language. Austin doesn’t really want to talk much about that.

Derrida & Searle

I probably did not understand all the concepts in Jacques Derrida’s articles we read this week; the main one being ‘Signature Event Context’.  I did understand although that there is a very tough intellectual battle going on that John R. Searle starts with Derrida by basically saying in his whole essay, basically what he said specifically to one of Derrida’s arguments: “the answer is a polite but firm, ‘No, it isn’t true.’”. Searle, although it seems, has effectively argued in favor of Austin; this is because he thinks to have very much discovered the true intentions of Austin and the true intentions of Derrida, and Derrida for him is wrong because he misunderstood, could not figure out the true intentions, meaning, of Austin. I will try and look at some of these concepts.

It seems Jacques Derrida is working with, or coming from the perspective of language and signification only on that plane more than Austin is pretending to do. I wouldn’t venture to say that the arguments are flawed from the get go because they are working on concepts that have nothing to with each other. But it can seem that they are indeed working two different realms of language. I will quote a line by Derrida: “He [Austin] then attempts to justify, with nonlinguistic reasons, the preference he has shown in the analysis of performatives… in the final instance, is the reference made therein to what Austin calls the source.” (19). The source is also known as the origin, the author, the referent, or the context (at least that is how I think Derrida uses them). In deed Austin is working, as I proposed in my post for Austin, with a material that directly conditions the validity or meaning of words (remember he said that a performative was not simply to say something but also to do something, be validated by a situation). This here is the fundamental divergence that Derrida takes from Austin’s proposition. He talks about meaning as supplementary. It is precisely Derrida’s project to create a distance from a source, from a referent because that, he says, limits the possibilities of language. Searle, in his response, limits his arguments to basically saying to Derrida that his close reading of Austin was not a correct interpretation. When Searle apposes Austin’s notion of repeatability of writing, he focuses on the material aspect of the reproducibility of a book. This, now in my reading of Derrida, is not what Derrida had in mind when he talked about writing as iterable.

Franz Kafka

The Penal Colony

Much of the theory (and one short story) that we have been reading in the past weeks in one way or another has the body at the center, or better yet at an invisible, or displaced center, of its theoretical propositions. (This week’s reading of a Kafka story, The Penal Colony, is not an exception.) Body can be viewed in a few different forms, i.e. social body, body of works, individual body, etc., although it is usually exemplified in the individual body of the subject. The body as being inseparable from language, I would propose the body as the general grounds of human inquiry and discussion. This may be perhaps because the body is where we feel, it is what decays on its own through time, it is what will bring us to our end (death), and therefore it is the most important surface on which to make a semantic inscription and with which to make organizational strategies before each one meets that end. The latter concept, ‘organizational strategy’, now suggests a political aspect. This organizational aspect, as Louis Althuser has shown (calling it infrastructure), is inseparable or cannot survive or exist without semantic inscription, or the assigning of meaning; in Althuser this area belongs to an upper lever called the superstructure, this is where politics, an intangible, resides. The body is therefore ground zero for any type of social formation or organization. This for some probably would be difficult to accept if a position outside of the material is not taken; meaning if one does not take a stance outside of just the actual individual’s body starting with his or her skin. The body as the center, ground zero, goes beyond actual inscriptions on the skin, perhaps the widespread modern use of the ‘tattoo’ might suggest otherwise, but that is not what I intend to discuss here.

In Kafka’s story The Penal Colony the body is, as I have already implied, the center, the nucleus holding the language together in its organized form. In this case although, I don’t believe the body is part of the main question, it is rather part of the answer to that question. The question is: where is justice made? (It is a vague question I know.) This of course leads to a discourse on justice; asking what justice is. In the text although, there seems to be a working definition of what justice is. Justice in the text is simply punishing the guilty and in regards to this the text works with the notion that everyone is guilty; the officer and old commandant certainly seem to think so; explicitly at least. The traveler, although, doesn’t think that way. He thinks an accused needs a due process before justice is made. In the end both actually think the same. I will explain. The whole point of the apparatus is to kill. There is absolutely no point in a machine with such intricacies of writing on the body if the condemned is still going to die. That would be useful if the condemned were to stay living. In the end the Traveler stays living and there is a reason for that. The old has given way to the new. The whole process of the spectacle is no longer necessary; it has achieved the logical outcome of making justice by writing on the body. This outcome is to have those inscriptions present in every living body. That is to say, one is still guilty, but messages like “Honour your superiors” or “Be just!” are, as the Officer says, experienced in the body. The Traveler is the immediate example of a controlled, disciplined, civil body. He leaves the penal colony, but even outside he is imprisoned, he is still in the penal colony because the inscriptions in his body control him, control his body; because he, like everyone else, is guilty. The due process he believes in is applying by force onto the body of the condemned, i.e. fines (you have to work to pay the fine, right?), confinement, maybe death penalty, etc., bodily inscriptions which he or she did not accept or relieved themselves of them; so it actually is a reapplying of the inscriptions. Either way, justice has been made on his body. The ‘peculiar apparatus’ is the puppeteer.

Jacques Lacan

“Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.”

The term ‘liberty’ comes to mind as I read this. This implies that if language, or better yet of the ‘discourse in the universal movement,’ is our (humans) master, as we are a subject by virtue of our ‘proper name’ giving us our place in the community, then the concept of liberty is ever more empty. We tend to think, or at least this is the general conception of liberty in our day, that liberty is being able to do or think as I please. This is the most common way of conceptualizing ‘liberty’. When I think of this I always think of the example of me, or a subject, being in front of 30 different television sets, with different brands and sizes and other specifications, and thinking that that, my being able to choose from 30 different television sets, is an expression of my liberty. The problem here is that the option of not buying, just out right living without a television set, never crossed my mind. In this example there are obviously many other forces at work limiting the full scope of my understanding of liberty. The freedom of being able to do perhaps is easier to pinpoint: this can be seen as the removal of restrictions upon the body, matter, itself; not being confined unjustly, being able to move as I please. The other one, the cognitive element is much more difficult to grasp. Lacan goes on to say that language is what distinguishes human society from natural society. So language is what makes us human and it enslaves us. This tells me that liberty doesn’t exist. We may think we have the freedom of ‘thought’, but in that case what doesn’t cross our minds is that when we think a certain way, we are subjected to that discourse and that there was manipulation in getting us to join that discourse. Pinpointing how we are not at liberty to think what we want to think is something that must be rejected if one is within the parameters of the general concept of liberty that I mentioned above. Lacan (and Freud) talks about the unconscious mind. One of Lacan’s theses’ is that the unconscious mind is made up of language. Therefore, in my observation, we are slaves to our unconsciousness. I am inclined to think that a psychotic person, maybe really be free when language doesn’t make us human or our unconscious, language, is unlocked.

Freud

One of the ideas that heavily resonated in my head while reading (for the first time) The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, was last week’s reading of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Barthes Mythologies. The most important notion and technique that I picked up from this reading Freud was that of reading a text, reading a sign. It seemed very similar to Saussure’s and Barthes’s respective projects. The most interesting part (the similarities are here) about Freud’s project is the transformation of an image (if that is what a dream is) into text. Our minds, our craniums, do not have a USB connection where we can connect a flash drive and download what is there to be analyzed in an external apparatus; in this case we would like to download the images or video, which our dreams are. If we could see these we would have images instead of writing. That’s interesting. Freud doesn’t analyze a picture, he analyzes language, writing, text, much in the same way Saussure analyzes a sign and Barthes analyzes myths (these do include images, films and other materials). To analyze the mind, the psyche, at least in Freud’s way, you inevitably have to turn what is in mind into writing. To me a dream is like one of Barthes mythologies. I may be wrong, but I like this idea. The dream thoughts and dream content stem from each word that is analyzed, and so on from each other. I’d like to think of these as signifier and signified. The dream, just like the sign, is arbitrary. It has no direct relation to anything outside of itself. The signs that constitute the dream get their meaning by their difference with the other words. Although there is a difference in the way Freud analyzes the dreams, which is somewhat different than what is given primacy in Saussure and Barthes. This difference is based on the synchronic and diachronic classes of signs. Saussure and Barthes seem to give primacy to the synchronic aspect of language; the plane where all language is without regards to time or evolution. Freud has similar concepts: ‘the work of condensation’ and ‘the work of displacement’. In the work of displacement there is a constant evolution of dream thoughts, they, as the name suggests, displace one another from a fixed, central position. There is a story being developed here which is a string tool for dream interpretation as opposed to just studying the condensed dream thoughts. I think Freud acknowledges the inseparability of the paradigmatic from the syntagmatic. All of this is housed in the unconscious. In a sense, that which is behind the sign and inseparable (signified and signifier) is in the ‘unconscious.’

The Communist Manifesto

This is my blog for The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, but first I would like to allude to a previous text on which we have commented. That would be the one on Guy de Maupassant’s short story Toine. In this story we have a man, Toine, who presides over all the land of the town. Presides is, perhaps, a soft word to use; rather, he is the owner of the land. But he is not just owner of the land; he is owner of everything on the land. He is not legally the owner of everything, but he owns the means of production and controls the labor force and also the ideological state apparatus that serves his needs. He enemies, to him, to his realization, could only be anyone like him; this is although is a not an issue because he holds a strong monopoly over the land (perhaps this is more what I mean by ‘owner of the land’). The story doesn’t start of at the beginning stage, the story of his development, up until the current situation. What is seen at the start of the story, through narrative technique, what is shown as if through a microscope, is an already developed Toine, an already advanced bourgeois. Around him we see a mingling lower middle, middle, and upper middle class. His inseparable antagonist is non-other than his wife. She is the labor force, the body, whom he exploits, and has exploited for more than thirty years, and whom has allowed him to amass the huge body that he has, due to his idleness, and also the huge amount of wealth. The time came where all Toine’s possessions cannot save him from his inevitable decline and the takeover of the labor force body, in this case his wife. This is at the end is not resolved; what is shown is his ever intent to keep his position. I have not intended to label with the proper external terms, as I deemed it, rather I argue the text shows these politics at work. There are many other discourses at work in the text, but this is at the center; the other discourses are complimentary to these politics. This story is not a retelling of the communist manifesto nor is this one of the other; again, that is not what I intend. There is although, this will be part of my argument, something very similar at work, connecting both of these works. The history of Marx’s proletariat and bourgeoisie and their current state of being details the formation of an antagonistic social body. The communist manifesto touches briefly on this point, which is the significance of bodies. The most important note it makes is when it proposes that the proletariat only has, or his most important good is, his labor to sell. Let’s remember Toine’s wife has not given him (nor received from him) anything of use but her labor; no children, no happiness. At work in the text is a discourse on the body; a politics of body. Which bodies matter? Is life just a body? What has been the the development of discourse on the body from the 19^th century to the 21^st? Gender is also an important part of this development… that is all for now.

So-sure

It is somewhat difficult to accept that a concept is inseparable from a sound image. It is more difficult to accept, although, that this concept and sound image, signified and signifier respectively, have no real basis in the material world, in nature. Nothing has an intrinsic name. Nothing is born with a name to represent it. Nothing, nobody, told us that a ‘dog’ is to be called a dog, nobody said that a mountain has the name mountain, intrinsically born with that name; based on the real, a referent has no name. This situation is what must be understood as the arbitrary nature of the sign; that is to say the signified does not follow any rule or adhesive joining it with the signifier. This of course does not mean that they can live independently; they are always together.

If the author, as Barthes proposes, is not necessary to interpret a text, then does that mean language alone can give meaning to a text? Saussure develops the argument that a person alone cannot change or create language because it is the social, communal, side of speech, that is to say that it is the determining factor of a community and organizer or recorder of the discourses that the speakers articulate. Saussure is conditioning, or better said, untangling, an identity, such as that of an author, to be understood only as a speaker and not as creator. The author, or the speaker involved in a speech act, does not create anything, does not create language and therefore is not, or should not be allowed, the right to subjectively assign meaning to a given text. This situation implies a certain relations of power. The analysis of signs, of language, of text, can disarticulate common acceptances of powers. Revealing its self is something of the nature of power, which may start with a speech act and the intent to name, to create and impose a name, a meaning. This is the act of trying to give an essence before something realizes that that essence is not what it thinks of itself.

All of this points me in the direction of thinking of such issues of what is real or what is truth. Is the reality I live truthful? Is ignorance bliss if aware of the implications that a further analysis might divulge? To a certain extent, when we stop thinking of concepts and ideas as natural or preconceived to the articulation of speech, we may actually discover truths in many aspects of our culture, and our creations.

Barthes

I would like to ask Roland Barthes (or rather, in the spirit of what I understand from his texts, ask his texts) a question: is the analysis of language and other signs the answer to all sociological/political issues or to the pursuits of truths? My question doesn’t have the intention of debating or arguing with Barthes; there is no malignant intent by posing that question. Even though I explain that, posing that question or questions like that could cast doubt on or generate some negativity towards his arguments. The question could be seen as the sweat on the characters in the film Julius Cesar that Barthes analyzes; the question is thinking there is some sort of thought behind a question enunciated in such a way. The aggressiveness in the question is enunciates with by the phrase ‘answer to all’. This is a phrase that is totalizing and, contingent upon a negative, whose answer implies the uselessness of the analysis of language as a possible tool for research. Confusing the sign with the signified is, as Barthes writes, a hybrid inserted into the sign which is made to be perceived as nature. Say we have a signified, this signified is the concept of ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ and the signifier is the color black. The sign would be thus that black= bad/evil. Or the fringe= roman-ness, sweat=thinking, which in turn = crime, the author= answers to the work, a work= a specific meaning, Einstein’s brain= thought machine, foam= no violence etc. Thus, if the analysis of language doesn’t answer all the problems than it is of no use and can be completely disregarded. I was careful although to ask the text for an answer and not the author. According to the very arguments of the texts, the texts would never give me one uniform answer. Thus, the intentions or connotations (positive or negative) of question posed would fail against the text; but they would not fail against the author. The author can give you a straight answer, but that limits the possibilities of discourse, the possibilities of meanings, and the denaturalization of the one and only. In essence, my understanding from the Barthes texts is that there are finger prints around the sign and its meaning(s). The task in language (textual) analysis is to untangle or uncover certain truths (or perhaps better, histories of signs and their meanings). This tool is counter to the power of prescribing, the power of ruling with no limit, the power of ‘creating reality without the real’. The death of author= liberation (of many entities).