As Bazin mentions in his essay ‘From what is cinema’ that cinema was a complete representation of reality for people like Muybridge, Lumiere, Niepce etc. and hence they tried to develop moving images of people to demonstrate the reality in true sense. This is how I would relate photography with cinema. Bazin further makes comparison of photography with painting and says that photography captures a three dimensional space whereas ‘the use of drawings’ only ‘satisfied the baroque need for the dramatic’. He beautifully defines the act of photography and its difference from painting, where he says that painting would always have the presence of the painter or his subjectivity would reflect in his work no matter how talented the painter is but it is only photography which can be created in the absence of the man. “All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.” (162). He says that painting creates eternity whereas photography captures the time.

I agree with Bazin when he says that photography, though, is very objective unlike painting which is subjective, the role of selecting the objects to be photographed depends however on the photographer but the ‘originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.’ We could see this in cinema, for example in the film Rear Window where the image captured from the window of the outside world is left open for the viewer to focus and interpret the image (many times). Or in one of the films made by Satyajit Ray, a famous Indian director, where he captures the image of a train passing through a village which still has no electricity or the excitement of two young kids looking at the train. We can understand how photography can capture the time in the image through the example of this film. Probably here the train was a source of introduction of the advancement of technology for the children who till then did not have any connection with technology. The other moments of capturing the time would be from the same film when one of the children fall sick and she is lying down on the floor beside a burning lamp which metaphorically demonstrates life and with the death of the child the flame goes off and the image captured is of darkness probably like the death.  The other interesting images would be the flight of stairs in one of the Russian film, the image of a factory from inside with its laborers working in a Charlie Chaplin film and the image of a never ending road in Easy Rider.

I believe that photography in cinema though, captures images from the real life but, it originates from the lens of the camera and it ‘contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.’

In this week reading I could relate a lot to Derrida’s Differance and other post modern writing especially when I started reading Cixous but interestingly when I moved further or read a bit more it became really complex and serious!!!!

Cixous in ‘The Newly Born Woman’ started her essay talking about the binary opposition and the hierarchy that exists in it, like – active/passive, Sun/Moon, Man/Woman etc. and questions the symbolic order which is created by Man. She states that man has the authority over this symbolic order and woman is absent, ‘nonexistent’ in this order. Therefore, the relation that exists is between father and son, also she questions the rejection of femininity by men. She challenges all the ideas be it philosophical, poetic or artistic without recognizing the other in oneself.

Irigaray in ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’ targets the language as one of the important elements in the symbolic order. Therefore, she suggests that women should mimic because that is what they have done and practiced till now. She says “to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it”.  Later in ‘Women on the Market’ she develops her argument based on Marx’s concept capitalist /proletariat. But surprisingly we see women are neither categorized under capitalists nor under proletariat but they are commodities or products exchanged and negotiated between two men. Although women are commodities that are ‘precious’, they are also ‘impenetrable, ungraspable and not susceptible to appropriation’. She also talks about the different role that are assigned to the women as per the convenience of the symbolic order – from a mother who cannot be exchanged anymore since she is a private property of the man as she says “This means that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private property, excluded from exchange”, whereas in case of prostitutes their body is “useful” because it has been used already by man and “the more it has served, the more it is worth”.

However, Audre Lorde’s argument on this topic has given a new twist to the readings of Feminism. It has challenged the western feminist theory which focuses in deconstructing the binary opposition of the symbolic order and asks to look feminism in a broader sense to include women of color, third-world people, working class and older people so that a solidarity can be developed against the oppressors. She says “….white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class and age”.  Further, she also stresses that when we speak broadly about feminism or demonstration of women’s culture we should not limit our production of art forms to one specific genre and “to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences  on the supplies available for producing art “. I find this very interesting as it allows people to participate from across the world to express their views, ideas, frustration etc without any restriction to any forms. She also gives importance to older people and says that through them we can ‘examine the living memories’.

I felt after reading this text that feminism is not simply fighting against the binary opposition but rather fighting for other oppressed and marginalized groups and communities. But to fight for them one has to understand that their culture, concern, economic condition etc are different from the other and therefore it cannot be homogenized. Hence, feminism is a complex issue.

This week while I was reading the different texts I started thinking about the various other readings that we have covered till now and how these are different from the one that we have read earlier. One thing that is very interesting for me to note and relate with the previous reading is that they are all based on the society or that I have mentioned the word ‘society’ in every reading or every blog. How the various readings deal with problems of the society and interpret them from their point of view.

The readings of Karl Marx in the book Literary Theory: An Anthology is arranged in such a way that in the initial pages we see the introduction of various terminologies to define a country, such as, population, division of classes, annual production and consumption etc.  We see that these terms are economic terms and he relates them to define the society, much later we see how he relates these terms to politics. He says that the concrete terms are product of our thought of comprehension which has been influenced by Capitalism in our thought process and so our thought is also a product. So we see that we are now able to connect the economic terminologies with politics in given society. Further, he relates this ‘politico-economic’ relation with the history of the society and we see that the relation is not simple but extremely complex and that it has a history connected to it. He talks about the various forms of ownership that persist in the society, like tribal, communal, feudal etc and every form of ownership has given rise to class division ‘the dominant and the dominated’. However, he later introduces the relation of capital to labor power and he gives utmost importance to the labor power for the capital to multiply and here we are introduced to the terminology of exploitation.

But, what stroke me as the most important point of Marx is when he talks about the division of labor in the ruling class – one who has the ruling ideas ‘mental labor’ and the other the ‘material labor’. Hence we realize that the idea to rule is also constructed and has the tendency to universalize them. He says that there is always a chance to enter into conflict between the rulers of mental labor and the material labor which topples the structure of the society and a new form of society is created with new ruling ideas. But before the revolution the ruling ideas are being related to the entire society, the ideas are homogenized by the new dominant class. Here we can pay attention to the term ‘new ruling idea’ because a new class comes into being and a new structure of class is established.  It is interesting for me because the critics of the new terms today like globalization, neoliberalism etc keep saying that there is a homogenization of ideas, problems, and other issues but now we could trace back and see how old is this concept of universalizing everything. And probably that is why today history is detached from several issues so that one is not capable of tracing back to the past and finds its root …. Marx has given so much importance to history ….. was he aware of the contemporary situation that we are facing??

It is interesting to see how dreams can be analyzed. Many of us take the dreams very seriously and think that they would come true if seen at a particular time of the sleep and many do not believe them at all and say that it is a “dream”. How notions with dreams are so well attached to our everyday life. For instance we say very often ‘it is a dream come true’. It is interesting for me to see how the concept of dream works in us with the help of science.

As Sigmund Freud talks about in “The Interpretation of Dreams” of concepts like latent content or dream contents and dream – thoughts.  The idea that dream is a result of the thoughts of our unconscious mind is another interesting aspect to look at. As it is said in the introduction of Interpretation of dreams that “the idea was that the mind harbors wishes or desires that lie outside awareness but that nevertheless manifest themselves at night in dreams”. Later in the same paragraph we see where it says that dream as a result of unconscious material is always repressed by the consciousness since those desires and wishes are not appropriate for the society. Hence, I interpret the conscious self as a social construct which obeys the norms and the code of conduct of the society and also adapts to it. As Julie Rivkin and Micheal Ryan mention in “Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: psychoanalysis” of the terms introjections and projection. Where introjections stand for adapting to certain characteristics from the society and projection stands for distancing ourselves from some of our own characteristics.  Can we then say that it is perhaps the projection which sometimes is projected through our unconsciousness in our dreams? Are the projections our hidden wishes and desires which we throw out perhaps due to the unacceptable nature of the society and therefore they manifest in our dreams?

The other interesting aspect of Freud’s discussion which I can very well relate to my reading of novels is “uncanny”.  Even though we strongly defend that we are not superstitious but read with great concentration when the technique ‘uncanny’ is applied by the writers to write suspense novels (detective, horror, etc.). We very well believe that some kind of clue is associated or hidden to certain act when that act is repeated many times in the life of the protagonist.  A technique used by the writers which ask the reader to concentrate on those repeated actions to find out the hidden mystery in it and we as readers follow it quite efficiently.