Rhet Twenty

Precis for Abolition of Man

2010-08-12T15:01:00.001-07:00

C.S. Lewis’ piece, The Abolition of Man, opens with the line, “Man’s conquest of Nature is an expression often used to describe the progress of science.” This conquest (or perceived conquest), according to Lewis, has led to the destruction, or abolition, of man.

Lewis begins his piece by discussing three advances in human technology which he feels are exemplary of what we call Man’s power over nature: The aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. However, these powers that Man holds, according to Lewis, are powers that are wielded by a small number of men, and these men decide whether or not other men should or can profit from them. In other words, man’s power of nature is merely “a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

Contraceptives, Lewis argues, allow current generations of men to control future generations, much in the same way that different technology allows some men to exert control over other men. However, the control in the former is much greater because it allows men to decide who will and will not exist! The power of current generations over future generations does not end there for Lewis. He argues that current generations pre-ordain how future generations will live because of the traditions and values they will pass on to them. Lewis gives these men the title of “Conditioners,” and states that they will condition other men according to their own values and judgments. He goes further and states that even though every generation will pass on useful and innovative technology to the next generation and they will undoubtedly improve on that technology, the prior generation exerts its power over the future generation because it pre-ordains the manner in which that technology will be utilized.

According to Lewis, men’s actions were derived from the “Tao,” which he describes as a natural force that leads men to inartificial values and judgments. Lewis argues that the men that have assumed control over all other men have taken to creating an artificial Tao, and instilling their own values in men. The types of values these men choose to teach other men is driven by their impulses according to Lewis. Which impulse these men choose to follow is left to chance, which according to Lewis, is synonymous with ‘nature.’ So, in essence, the men who have conquered Nature and dictate the manner in which other men live their lives are subject to their own irrational random impulses that are no different than Nature. Therefore, even though it may seem as though Men and the Conditioners have completely conquered Nature, this, according to Lewis, is not the case. Because the Conditioners of men are subject to their own natural irrational impulses, they are then subject to nature. So, according to Lewis, “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out to be Nature’s Conquest of Man.”

A Precis on Carol Adams

2010-08-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

Carol Adams invites her readers to engage in a wider understanding of feminism which is sensitive to politics of domination arising out of patriarchy that is not limited to oppression of women, but rather includes other forms of exploitation resulting from such politics of domination such as racism and nonhuman animal killing and slavery. She sees these others forms of exploitations originating from the very patriarchal system and what brings them all together is the exploitations of bodies, whether the bodies are those of human animals or nonhuman animals. This larger understanding of feminism acknowledges discrimination of race, sex and species through beastializing discourse. She notes that traditionally feminism responded being positioned less than man, somewhere between man and other animals in the hierarchy of beings, with the assertion “we are not animals, we are humans.” Adams's claims constitute a challenge to orthodox feminism that takes human/animal dualism for granted by questioning this dualism, stating “animals exist categorically as that which is not human” hence, something that can be exploited without an ethical obligation. This understanding is deeply naturalized, and constantly justified in false ways.
She presents four points that her arguments are based on: the reality of oppression, gender, race and species are constructs that have been naturalized, social domination of bodies, the business of feminism is not merely man-woman relation, but through feminism we understand “social construction of reality.” Through these, she suggests an “antiracist feminist theory that includes animals” that emphasizes on interlocking systems of domination, that is, instead of seeing identity as additive, as “either/or,” she focuses on the politics of domination, and its different effects; for instance, patriarchy is not simply a social structure through which women are oppressed, there are other kinds of oppressions, other kinds of exploitations that is practiced through it.
She responds to several oppositions: when it is said that she has a “hang-up” with food, she asks, “Whose bodies matter?” When she is told that her philosophy turns scientific “fact” into contradiction, she asks, “Whose science?” When they claim that religion teaches us that there is nothing wrong with eating animals, she asks, “Whose God?” By asking these, she gets the reader to see from different perspectives, rather than being limited to one's own, through identification with “the Other.”
Western ethical discourse traditionally excluded nonhuman animals, accepting no moral obligation to them, paving the way for endless exploitations. In this sense, nonhuman animals' exclusion from the “human” category constitutes a special case which is not that of racism or sexism; it is true that the “human” category is restricted to “white man” in many instances, excluding people of color, and women, as well as nonhuman animals, but nonhuman animals are already not human. Human's special status within ethics naturally excluded nonhuman animals; the category is to be expanded to embody humans other than the white man, but how can the human category be expanded to include that which is not human? The very label this category attached on itself makes it seem impossible to do so, rendering exclusion of nonhuman animals from moral obligation fundamental, natural. She presents Cartesian dualism of mind/body to demonstrate how human/animal dualism is naturalized through the notion of consciousness; and through this human consciousness, human asserts a special status: that which is hierarchically higher, a status whose holders can exploit those who do not hold that status.
Those who are seen as less than the white man are positioned somewhere close to animals in the hierarchy, through beastializing discourse. Adams present synonyms for “beast:” “brute, animal, brutish, brutal, beastly, bestial.” She suggests that animals are not beasts, but are beastialized; just as those left out of the category of “human” are beastialized. Therefore a feminist response to being positioned less than man should not be to declare “we are not animals, we are humans;” but rather, to assert “we are neither man nor beast.” One is not to declare their humanity through separation from animality; for humans are animals, and suffering of nonhuman animals does matter.
Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu

Precis on Latour

2010-08-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the late post; technology loves me not.

Latour exclaims that the objective of social science and the very definition of what is social has come under scrutiny and transformed because of the apocalyptic ecological crisis. He is vehement that the discipline should focus on associations rather than specific and (Latour implies) insignificant topics that miss the more important understanding of the whole. The lecture was given to and for the annual meeting of British sociologists but the appeal of his argument is broadened to include all ‘earthlings’; the ecological crisis is the daunting and imminent peril that faces all humankind. Though he mainly addresses the sociologists because they are the physical audience present before him, he implores every being to realize that uncovering and understanding the entire chaining of our world is absolutely necessary for the potential discovery of a solution to the universal ecological problem.

    Latour presents the potential counter arguments in the form of a question. “What has this to do”, you could object, “with the topic of the social sciences? No matter how you define what humans do, sociologists can still study their shifting ‘identities’, their moving ‘technologies’, their newly formed ‘relationships’. ‘Social connections’ will always be ‘social connections’.”It is necessary for Latour to make these acknowledgements because he makes radical assertions and uproots the definition of social and the fundamentals of an entire discipline. He uses his refutation to delineate between the incorrect view of sociology that the opposition holds (emancipation and modernization) and introduces the proper perspective of sociology as explicitation and attachments. Latour is dedicated to clarity in his argumentation and is explicit in his thesis, “This is why, many years ago, I proposed that we shift the definition of sociology from the study of “social” connections to the study of “associations”- keeping the same Latin etymology but refusing to limit the inquiries to one domain only, as if, side by side, we had “social”, “psychological”, “legal”, “biological” and “economic connections, each with its own science and protocols.

    The main warrant for his argument is that the current usage of first empiricism, which ignores meaningful aspects of observation such as human sensory experience, fails to incorporate the associations that allow this form of science to make meaningful contributions to society. Latour does not use figurative language extensively but metaphorizes non-social modes of connections with lego building on the seventh page. Though it does give the audience a visualization the metaphor was clumsy (which Latour admits immediately in the next paragraph) and did not add any explanatory or argumentative force to his point about heterogeneous connections.

    Though Latour promises in the beginning not to add another “gloomy prognosis”, he leaves us with Lovelock’s theory that we have about forty three years to change radically and shift the foundations of things we as individuals have taken for granted and ascribed to if we are to have hopes of preserving ourselves and the achievements of our race. Not gloomy indeed.

Precis: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"

2010-08-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, written in 1986 and expanded for publication in 1991, addresses the radical feminist movement that gained popularity in the 70’s and 80’s in the US and Europe. As a component of “second wave” activism, radical feminism attempted to analyze the roots of gender oppression and the impulses that propelled it. As a philosopher of science, Haraway takes issue with the idea that socially constructed problems like patriarchy could be challenged with extensive research and interrogation. Throughout the piece, she concerns herself with rejecting masculinist histories, and embarks upon writing a “political myth” for today’s times that is faithful both to feminism and materialism in a blasphemic and ironic manner.

Haraway begins her manifesto by introducing and defining her main metaphor, the cyborg. She mentions that part of the reason she is attracted to the metaphor of the cyborg lies with its ability to help her reconceptualize socialist feminism in a “postmodernist, non-naturalist” mode. She claims that cyborgs are “outside gender” because they do not depend on reproduction for existence, and can be represented via: the blurring of animal and human, human and machine, and the physical and non-physical.

Much of Haraway’s piece deals specifically with the issue of feminist political organizing in light of cyborg politics. She counsels against identity politics, noting “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women”, and feminists might better be served by considering “woman” to be a socially constructed category along the same lines of “homosexuals” and “youth”. Haraway vocalizes her contempt against the notion that feminist politics, like cyborg ontology, works as a series of partialities rather than a totalizing whole.

Haraway argues, feminist science fiction’s reconceptualization of the cyborg shows readers that “the machine is not an ‘it’ to be animated, worshipped, and dominated”. Rather, the machine represents our processes and aspects of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines, and they do not dominate or threaten us. Haraway finishes her manifesto by restating three crucial arguments of the essay:

“The production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now.”
“Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology." Haraway adds that taking responsibility also means "embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts."
Cyborg imagery suggests "a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves."

Obviously, the scope of this piece is directed toward women, and I saw this most vividly demonstrated in Haraway’s description of the “New Industrial Revolution” and its world-wide working class. She argues that women produce the majority of its labor, which is feminized in the context of the new economy. Nevertheless, the fact that cyborg science fiction blurs the boundaries between the status of men, women, and humans in general makes for a better understanding of the piece as a reconstitution of a utopian world without gender.

Precis: Naomi Klein - No Logo

2010-08-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Look at me, waiting until almost the absolute last minute to post this. Ain't procrastination great?

The excerpt from Naomi Klein's No Logo argues that the concept of promoting the brand rather than the product, an idea born in the 1980s and successfully employed in the 1990s, has completely revolutionized the fundamental ideas of marketing and advertising in the United States. While advertisers had previously focused on promoting the supposed benefits of the product they were selling, this new strategy focused on promoting a lifestyle built around brand names – and buying products associated with those brand names to stay up-to-date on the lifestyles. It shifted the focus of the companies from producing to marketing, and, in doing so, they found they could increase profits while cutting costs – essentially, every CEO's dream come true.

Klein places the purchase of Kraft by Philip Morris as the pivotal moment when advertising the brand itself became the key feature. From that point forward, the companies who survived best focused most on their brand's philosophy, not on their competition's prices or their product's benefits. She demonstrates this with both descriptions of modern franchises and interviews with their company heads and advertising directors. The one with the head of Nike is most telling; he straightforwardly says that the companies focus has shifted away from both production and design and towards creating the most effective marketing strategy. It doesn't matter how good the product is as long as you can sell it.

The excerpt, like the rest of the book, is pitched to naive American consumers, people who think they know – but really don't know – the abuses inherent in the system. By describing the models of modern marketing campaigns, it challenges the reader to look at his or her own purchases. How much is he or she buying into brand loyalty instead product quality? Certainly, there are legions of Apple and Starbucks fans who see that brand as a way of life. Although Klein talks briefly about the rise of discount supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and the small-name brands associated with cheaper costs, the piece makes the overall case that the continuing staying power of many brands and rise of new ones prove that the industry was not severely harmed by the discounters, but was instead just as dominant as before, evolving to stay at the top. When a group of weeds is being attacked by Round Up Ready, the theory of natural selection says that the ones with a genetic mutation allowing them to survive will quickly become dominant. A very similar thing happened with the large corporations: when faced with an attack by the discounters, some companies died, but others with better strategies rose to take their place. Klein is hinting that in a capitalist system, companies will continue to find new and improved ways to make a profit. If that means outsourcing production and focusing on corporate image, than so be it. It's business.

Precis: Arendt's The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man

2010-08-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

I decided to take a somewhat different approach to the précis, in light of the fact that others have already posted very good overviews of the text. I decided that I would make my précis the “departure point” and bring up what I think are some glaring problems of the text. I picked my 5 least favorite uses of quotes and also the attack on science as a whole through the attack on physics in specific.

Early on Arendt establishes a dichotomy. There are scientists and there are the laymen. The laymen she associates with humanism and the scientists with, not a misanthropy, but definitely a lack of caring for humanity. But, there is an issue with who Arendt is calling “scientist.” Originally she uses the word physicist, but quickly supplants physicist with scientist. In this way she equates science and physics. She argues against all of science, particularly the questions science seeks to answer, but her criticisms are specific to physics and to quantum mechanics and atomic physics. Her criticisms are based upon the words of the physicists in those fields – very prominent physicists (Schrödinger, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.). However, she often takes their words out of context, or applies meaning to their quotes that they don’t necessarily imply. A few of those quotes are as follows:

1. “The data with which modern physical research is concerned turn up like “mysterious messenger[s] from the real world.”[3] They are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”

This implication that the data is possibly not confirmable is an attack on the world that corresponds to this data, a world she views as different from the world we obtain through our senses.

However, what Arendt doesn’t seem to understand is that the processes by which these “machines” detect are based on the same processes that our senses work with. Although this quote is a reference to observing things beyond the scope of our senses, or indirect observations (observing a change by an effect it has elsewhere) the results are still obtained by the same process by which our senses are confirmed, namely waves, but in a scale that gives more information about the world. To attack the scientific world in this way is very much to attack one’s own senses and does not offer any reason as to why one of these worlds ought to be preferable to the other.

2. “Max Planck was right, and the miracle of modern science is indeed that this science could be purged “of all anthropomorphic elements” because the purging was done by men. Man has left behind his humanity.”

I contrast this to the idea of the unexamined life. When a life is examined must it not also be devoid of assumptions, and multi-perspective? Can anything be examined only from a single perspective? Is science being criticized for its alternative perspective? And humanism being argued for based on its uniperspective? Not too sure if she answers this.

3. “In the words of Erwin Schrödinger, the new universe that we try to “conquer” is not only “practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable,” for “however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle,’ but much more so than a ‘winged lion.’”

The “universe” Schodinger is likely referring to is the “universe” of quantum mechanics. Not the universe in the ultimate sense, but in the sense of encompassing a field of study. These are not claims about the universe we live in, nor a rejection of what we observe in our life, the connection between the quantum universe and our own are only now being discovered. Though Arendt argues that these claims effect our life even when they aren’t understood, the only real example that she produces is that of the atomic bomb. She does not show how quantum mechanics, the field she is referencing here, has effected our lives. Quantum mechanics is still too far removed from our world to be practical yet, and it describes the world at a level that it recognizes is not relevant to the “universe” that we live in. Quantization is easily simplified into continuity and described classically at our level. The level at which quantization is important is smaller than we are in relation to the entirety of the universe and as such we are unable to comprehend the scale. However, she also uses this claim as well as the next claim to discuss how science is self-defeating.

4. “the most significant indication that it might be self-defeating consists in Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg showed conclusively that there is a definite and final limit to the accuracy of all measurements obtainable by man-devised instruments for those “mysterious messengers from the real world.” The uncertainty principle “asserts that there are certain pairs of quantities, like the position and velocity of a particle, that are related in such a way that determining one of them with increased precision necessarily entails determining the other one with reduced precision.”[23] Heisenberg concludes from this fact that “we decide, by our selection of the type of observation employed, which aspects of nature are to be determined and which are to be blurred.”

Arendt completely misunderstands this concept, and because she does her conclusion is unfounded. Uncertainty is not a phenomenon related only to measurement, and by that a limitation of what we are capable of knowing about nature; it is a description of how much nature can know about its self. It is in fact a discovery that doesn’t show how man can never reach the limit of science (and space) but that space and nature have their own limits. Uncertainty is why the atom does not collapse on itself, it is why life is capable of existing. The very fact that an electron does not simply fly towards the proton (as we all know unlike charges attract one another), and reduce all matter to a neutron soup, is necessary for matter to exist in various forms. How uncertainty governs this phenomenon is that if an electron constrained its position to an exact spot its momentum (and consequently, energy) becomes too great. This is why there is no zero energy ground state, why absolute zero cannot be reached, and ultimately why the electron is not able to attach to the proton even though they are electrically attracted. The claim that this simply shows that science is doomed to be limited is boldly wrong. It is proof that science reaches the natural boundaries.

I know that Arendt's argument is not wholly linked to the usage of these quotes, but these quotes illustrate that Arendt doesn't know what she is talking about when it comes to the science she is criticizing. Rather than argue that science ought to end, why not argue that everyone should become fluent in the language it uses? Or that everyone empower themselves (if scientists have so much power) and bridge the gap to science themselves.

5. objectivity of the natural world, so that man in his hunt for “objective reality” suddenly discovered that he always “confronts himself alone.”

Again, another quotation used without any context. Can we possibly see who this quote could be viewed differently than Arendt views it? What if it is a description about how man confronts his own mental limitations, not his self. He is not injecting his self into the results, thought that is a possibility, but he is trying to overcome himself. These scientists wrote extensively about how quantum mechanics is completely non-intuitive, and when one studies this field ones insistence on intuition regularly gets on one’s way. To read this as an insistence that man injects his self into his science is, I think, Arendt’s misunderstanding of the field itself.

Precis on Latour's Plea for Earthly Sciences

2010-08-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

In a text that literally begins with “ladies and gentleman,” it’s impossible for us to ignore the “Plea for Earthly Sciences” that Latour goes on to make. It’s refreshing that the thing he begins with is a she, even if it’s the accusation that we all of us are killing her and we none of us are doing it with reason. “Humans, as a whole,” wage war “without any explicit declaration,” and surely without any possibilities of winning, “against Gaia,” the goddess who has managed to “maintain life on Earth inside some fluctuating albeit restricted limits” (read: the atmosphere/biosphere/“magneto-sphere”—Dale’s word, not mine). For a lecture that’s given to an audience of sociologists, the politics he’s identifying with, at this point, and which he’ll circle back to at the end, sound undeniably green. Much like the British (those bloody semi-colonical British) at the beaches of Dunkirk, he spends the rest of the text retreating from the facts of truly “global disasters” to the crises that unite us in what must be a collective turning to face the facts.

Latour takes up Sloterdijk (ha, right?) when he says that the moment we took a breath of gas and not air is the moment we came to understand “the world” as “the environment.” This was the inaugural moment for modernity then, and it is from within that space that he defines the domain of the social. The world was transformed into the environment, then, in much the same way that the ecological crisis was transformed into a response, now, for the annual meeting which he is presently addressing. The meeting is titled, and I quote him, “quot[ing]: social connections: identities, technologies, and relationships.”

After a meditation on why we shouldn’t be proud to endorse the use of the word Anthropocene to describe “this new geological era,” (and why not? Aren’t we capable of war crimes of such a proportion that we should get to name our own extinction after us?)—Latour taks a jab at “the future.”

But something strange happens to our identities as Earthlings when the definition of the future changes. It’s not that we’re “free at last!” It’s that we’re sent “back to the design table” that I imagine looks a lot like the table in Haraway’s INFORMATICS. To the extent that that’s the occasion for this speech, Latour proposes (for “a second time,” because apparently the first was many years ago when nobody was listening) that “we shift the definition of sociology from the study of the social connections to the study of associations.” The shifting ensures that the social stays true to its etymology in a way that allows it also to explicate all other types of connections—the non-social: the natural, the material, the economic, the biological, the psychological.

Social is defined, in order of ascending importance, as social n1 or as social n2.

Social n1 is unsustainable, and no one is more acutely aware of that than Latour himself. It is defined as a domain that is not “non-social.” Not only does this fail to explain anything—including itself—it has to be explained. It solicits an explanation that can perhaps be best understood as the disappearance of “nature and society.” What Latour means by this is no small thing: it is a sea change (like the sea change that Gore endlessly cites in an Inconvenient Truth) in which matters of fact have become matters of concern and in which objects have become things.

Of what can the world possibly consist when it is made neither of “nature or society or any combination thereof”?

If we look to actor-network-theory (ANT), we have the example that my signature on a contract is a thing that is binding, but that it is binding legally and not socially. If we look to STS, we have the example of a container within which a space for definition of the “global” was opened up. It is the same thing to say that the spread of the container depends on “legal litigation” (among accounting procedures, labor relations among workers unions, and so on) as it is to say that a technology is an assemblage of “complex heterogenous threads.” The examples of law and technology tell us that the durability, solidarity, force and intelligibility of the associations is entirely due to the ways by which laws and techniques connect.

The problem—as made obvious at the level of examples themselves—is that these connections are radically contingent. When Latour says that a theory cannot claim that every mode of connection is specific, we are relieved and ready to hear the next of his theses: that “the social sciences have a true object which is not the social per se, but the shifting attachments offered by various non-social modes of connections.” When we realize this obfuscates more than illuminates his argument, we realize that it all makes sense if we just think of it as “Legos.” (What could possibly be more grounding than a toy pile?) It’s important that legos are used to build things—they’re literally building blocks. Legos—blocks that metaphorically represent things like the law, religion, politics, technology, avant-garde art—come in different colors and shapes and are differently pegged. They are particular, socialized, historicized. When a kind of collective is then built out of this heterogeneity, then all of a sudden things like “bricks coming together through legal ties” start happening. Even though the bricks come from “all over the place,” the thing that happens when they come together is that they are stronger in their solidarity regardless of the mode of connection of religion or politics or science.” And then when it is big enough, we, like children, smile and point at it and say of it “look, this is the social.”

When we look to define things like “science,” the closest thing to a definition we can come to is to nudge up against heuristics like it is literally the sum of its parts. If the way that a lego, a particular social domain, finds its way to solidarity is vis a vis the connections it makes in its continuity with other legos, the non-social domains, then we must look at the connections which are necessarily inexhaustible (“legally, scientifically, religiously, artistically, politically, technically,” and so on).

At a place in the text where our attention should “shift to the modes of connections,” it is appropriate that Latour would end by connecting his project back up to the place from which he began. When he acknowledges that the problem of the social sciences is that “they are not empirical enough,” the thing he does is jettison empiricism itself. Just at the time in history when it is most crucial that we redesign the whole sphere of existence “from top to bottom,” the thing he does instead is say—with trepidation, nonetheless—that we have to give up on what we hitherto have always depended on. We must give up breathing the air that has figured the world because when we treat palpably finite resources as though they were infinite we solicit a kind of murderous fantasy that only ever can be met with mustard gas.

Thanks, Rhet Twenty Summer 2010!

2010-08-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4nSxArk9g8

Précis on The Abolition of Man

2010-08-12T01:15:00.000-07:00

In The Abolition of Man, author C.S. Lewis writes about “Man’s conquest of Nature,” a phrase typically used to describe the progress of applied science. Lewis argues that “each new power won by man is a power over man as well.” He exemplifies this idea with three objects: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In regards to aeroplanes and the wireless, we can throw bombs from these but also bomb ourselves; by contraception, possible generations are denied existence; this simply implies selective breeding. They are what one generation may prefer. Hence, from this perspective, what we see as “Man's power over Nature” actually turns out to be “a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” As men seek to conquer Nature, humans are not only “the general who triumphs” but are also “the prisoners who follows the triumphal car.”

The final stage is when humanity gains full control of itself. C.S. Lewis writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.” He suggests that the ruling minority will be the “Conditioners” or people “who really can cut out posterity in what shape they please.” Human conscience will thus work in a way the Conditioners want it to work. Human concepts about morality (good and evil) are among the many things for them to decide upon.

The human race’s motives have essentially become manipulated by these Conditioners, and since their power is effective, human beings will be subjected to such forces of nature as happen to have acted upon the Conditioners. Thus, Man’s conquest of Nature will render Nature’s conquest of Man--the Abolition of Man. Since the existence of modern science, Man’s conquest of Nature has paradoxically caused Man to surrender to Nature because what is conquered by Man ultimately belongs to the realm of Nature. This surrender may require some “repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction” to what we are conquering.

A “magician’s bargain” is an analogy for the final stage; we are sacrificing our souls in return for power. This also serves as a reminder of the common impulse where both science and magic had begun to merge in early modern times. Although magic had failed and science had succeeded, both were engaged in the same purpose and that was “to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.”

He continues, “But you cannot go on `explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.” By this, Lewis says that we cannot go on “seeing through things” forever because “seeing through all things” will render everything invisible and thus cause us to see nothing.

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Side note: Sorry Prof. Carrico and everybody else for making you guys read another précis of The Abolition of Man for the nth time :(

Maria Chow

Precis - The Abolition of Man

2010-08-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

Lewis argues that mankind will be the source of his own destruction. Of course putting it in those terms is an over simplification. It seems that man has become obsessed with conquering nature. Lewis argues that we are only able to see the larger, more grand, biologic process and in doing so we lose our position of power in the world. We stop doing things that make sense for us and our immediate futures and make sacrifices to benefit a future that we will never see. Lewis illustrates this idea with the man dying of tuberculosis who considers himself a casualty. The man in the story did not mind his own death because he could rationalize that it was serving the greater purpose, would allow us to win, but is he really a winner if he’s dead? We continue to look at the bigger picture, a picture which does not include humanistic concerns, and that puts mankind in great jeopardy.

Because the argument makes an appeal to basic humanistic concerns it seems clear that the audience is the basic human. What do we mean b the basic human? Well, mostly anyone but the scientist. I see myself in that group because I don’t call into question my human impulses, like scratching an itch. I just respond accordingly. Because I see myself as an average person it makes me more susceptible to the argument. I agree that our conquest of nature becomes futile. However, I can see this argument as having several objections. Like many texts, its not enough to simply expose a problem, you must offer a solution. Lewis’ solution of creating and maintaining a Tao is not clear to me. I think an unanswered objection is that anything could be a sort of Tao including believing in science.

It seems to me that Lewis has a more specific idea of what a Tao should be and not so much what it could be. For him I think the stakes where human decency and common sense. Science can be cold and heartless, but Lewis believes we must subscribe to a value system where there is good and bad. Without a Tao good and bad are just words which can be applied to anything. I think Lewis is most definitely attempting to alter conduct. He wants people to exist in their present condition and behave accordingly.

I find two sentences which clearly state what I believe to be Lewis’ thesis. The first reads thusly “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” I chose this sentence because it highlights the irony of the entire situation. The more we do the more vulnerable we become. We are lucky enough to be able to control ourselves and behave in a manner that supports our own well being, but if we become subject to our natural wants and instincts then we leap into the unknown, into chance, which ultimately destroys us. The other sentence I find exemplary of Lewis’ thesis reads “to see through all things is the same as not to see.” This again highlights the seeming futility of the scientific project at hand, but also makes us realize that we cannot understand everything. We cannot attempt to explain everything because we explain away explanation itself. We lose our capacity to understand the new things we explain. He writes that the goal of seeing through something must be to see whatever it is on the other side.

There are three particularly interesting pieces of evidence that Lewis uses to illustrate his point; the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. Each item is an innovation of science which would seem to empower mankind, but it actually strips him of t. First you have the airplane or aeroplane as he knew it. Sure, now we have the ability to travel further distances faster, but my physical self has not become any stronger. I now rely on someone else to get me from point A to B and one man can withhold that privilege from me. I become subject to someone else and lose some of my own power. The contraceptive is an extremely interesting and poignant example because it is a blatant example of destruction of humans. If we naturally produce offspring through reproduction why should we manufacture things to reverse and halt that process? For Lewis it not only doesn’t make sense, but contributes to the destruction of our species. It’s here where Lewis may go a little too far. He believes that each generation is subject to the next. We have the power to decide whether a possible life come into existence, however Lewis believes that one dominant sets the tone for the billions of people to come afterwards. It seems to me that every era equally impacts the prior one. Although the influence of the Romans may seem more apparent, I think the discoveries and mindsets of societies before and after have played just as crucial role, especially since Rome was influenced b the time period before it.

Despite Lewis’ extreme argument, it seems completely plausible that man could serve as its own destroyer. We continually analyze away things that should be most pertinent to us and what we’ll be left with may not be something we want. Lewis states that the last thing to be conquered will be human nature which makes sense. We can’t explain why we art h way we are, because if we did then we wouldn’t be that way. We would be subject to what nature tells us to want, devoid of the human capacity to make our own decisions. Our posterity would suffer because they would be subject to chance. It makes sense that the abolition of man would come from man. Let us hope that this is not the case.

-Isaac Jackson

Last one

2010-08-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

The pesty semicolon

2010-08-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

Skylar, if you want my 2 cents, here it is:

You wrote:
"In John Carpenter’s 1988 action thriller “They Live”, greed has lead to a complete inversion of what is considered human transforming those who are biologically human into a low class group of sub-humans... I'm usually good with this, but I can't figure it out this time. Thanks"

My suggestion:

A semicolon is used between two closely related sentences. The operative phrase is "closely related sentences." I would use a comma after "human" because the latter phrase beginning with "transforming" is not a sentence. The more technical explanation escapes me. Sorry!

Further suggestions:

1. Check MLA (or some other format) regarding the comma outside of quotations: "They Live," is my preference; I seem to be in a growing minority on that one. (I still use two spaces after punctuation, although the latest edition of MLA suggests that one space is sufficient; two spaces is okay, unless prohibited by a professor or editor.)

2. Did you intend to write "led" rather than "lead"? (I've slipped on that one a time or two myself!)

I hope these friendly colleague-to-colleague suggestions help.

Precis: Judith Butler - Precarious Life

2010-08-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

In the fifth chapter of her book, Precarious Life, Judith Butler, in response to a story she heard claiming that the humanities had lost their moral authority, argues for a more intimate analysis of the relationship between the modes of address and the moral demand or expectations prompted by those addresses. She uses a Jewish ethic of non-violence and an interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face” to explain how it is that the address by others results in binding and unwanted or unprecedented moral demands. Through this analysis, she is ultimately making an argument in support of an existing value of the humanities.

According to Butler, the face, which Levinas makes clear, “is not exclusively a human face”—as it can be represented by an expressive human back that seems to demonstrate, in a personified manner, human agony—is the humanizing notion that produces an ethical struggle (133). The face is a mode of address and responding to the face signifies an understanding of its precariousness, an understanding of the relation between your own precariousness and that of the Other. Understanding and legitimizing the existence of the face is to legitimize an ethical relationship between yourself and the moral authority of the Other. This ethical relationship, however, is a dichotomized one, with both sides fighting each other. According to Butler, although the face clearly says “Thou shalt not kill,” it simultaneously produces, among those it addresses, a temptation to kill. As Butler describes, “There is fear for one’s own survival, and there is anxiety about hurting the Other, and these two impulses are at war with each other…But they are at war with each other to not be at war…the nonviolence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but…from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence” (137). And although this “war” could be theoretically ended by justifying the killing of someone who could possibly make you undergo violence, Levinas argues that self-preservation is not justification for murder.

Furthermore in her argument, Butler is trying to explain the relationship between discourse and moral authority. The face is tied to discourse because it speaks—because it “says” “Thou shalt not kill.” The relationship between language and the Other is another part of the ethical relationship between the face and moral authority. Butler argues that we don’t and can’t speak and legitimate language without first being addressed by the Other. Therefore, she says, once the Other no longer exists, neither can language. This can be tied back to the quote she previously uses by Levinas: “My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world…” –the Other, who is legitimized by the notion of the “face,” is a crucial facet of society, of the human need for sociality and ethical boundaries (132). “Language,” she says, “communicates the precariousness of life that establishes the ongoing tension of a non-violent ethics” (139). The Other legitimizes language, thus establishing a relationship between discourse and moral authority because language allows for this tension between the two divided reactions to the “face.” But although language allows for this non-violence, it is also innately embedded with a certain violence. This is because, according to Levinas, the situation of discourse is one in which we are held hostage. We do not ask to be addressed, but must conform to the framework of the address we receive.

Addittionally, Butler argues for an ethic of Jewish non-violence, by explaining Levina’s account of the relationship between violence and ethics. Butler further explains Levina’s notion of the “face” by tackling the issue of humanization and dehumanization. She addresses Levina’s paradox that although the “face” is not exclusively a human face, it is the source of humanization. She argues that there is a difference between the “inhumane but humanizing face”—that is to say, a face that through personification is humanized (i.e. the back that “screams”)—and the “dehumanization that can also take place through the face”—meaning, to use this notion of the face to reduce the Other to less than human (141). For example, Saddam Hussein’s face is dehumanized in American media to represent tyranny. Butler also uses the example of the women on the front page of the New York Times with their burkas taken off. Butler describes how this has dehumanized their real and figurative faces to a symbolic nature—the “symbol of successfully exported American cultural progress” (142). Here, the face acts as a rationale to the violence imposed on others by the War on Terror. Here, the violence imposed on the other is justified by the threat of violence upon us. The war between the two previously mentioned dichotomies ends (for now at least), with one side taking control. The face is not humanized in this situation, as Levina argued. Rather, the characteristics that would humanize it (the pain and agony of wartime) is hidden. Butler explains that this situation is confounding. Although the image of those women or Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden gives a face to the war, it is dehumanizing in some instances.

Through this essay, Butler is addressing both critics and supporters of humanities. She argues that the critical approach possible through the field of humanities is essential to the issue of dehumanization in American media. This dehumanization prohibits us from mourning the horrors of war because it prohibits us from giving those horrors a legitimizing face, as was done during the Vietnam War. Rather, the media uses the face both to give purpose to war and to demonstrate its successes. The figurative and literal face is not allowed to serve its ironic yet essential purpose of inciting us into an ethical fight that prohibits the killing of the Other. This, she says, is an “ethical outrage” (150). Therefore, she calls upon her audience to reignite their intellectual critiques and constant questioning that is characteristic of humanities, as it is necessary to create oppositional and ethical voices. To lessen the fear of voicing opposing views and thus bring into question questionable ethics is, according to Butler, the existing value of humanities.

Katia Barron

Precis: No Logo

2010-08-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

In the excerpt from No Logo, Naomi Klein describes the transformation of the world of marketing, advertising, and production in general. She contends that the primary focus of brands is no longer the quality of their products, but rather the perception of their entire brand. Once one believes the brand represents some sort of lifestyle or image that they identify with, or would like to identify with, the shortcomings of the product are no longer relevant. Her discussion of brands such as Nike, Apple, and Starbucks help further explain her points on the image of a company.

What does the slogan “Just do it” have to do with athletic gear? Why do people believe they perform better with Nike products that are made out of the same material and manufactured in the same country by the same workers? Why is the image that Starbucks puts on every one of their products a mermaid? Why do some people prefer to get the same exact cup of plain coffee from Starbucks instead of Dunkin’ Donuts? Why do people wait in lines for hours to throw money at Apple for an iPhone when they have obvious flaws?

The obvious reply is that associating oneself with an idealized image is what drives people to these extremes. The comfort gained from that positive association justifies paying double and sometimes triple the price. What people are missing here is that this whole brand image process and emphasis is what ends up hurting them in the long run. The consumer becomes blind to the downfalls and shortcomings of their own preferred brand and emphasizes the negatives of competitors.

The primary audience of this piece can be described as just about any consumer in today’s market. These brand discusses are known worldwide. They are household names. Marlboro for instance may be the single most recognizable brand of cigarettes on the market today; the same goes for Nike, Apple, and Starbucks in their respective fields.

I believe the aim of this piece to call into question assumptions about brand loyalty. Why do I personally refuse to wear or buy any brand of undergarment other than Hanes? If I were to compare the brand with Fruit of the Loom, for instance, I would see that Hanes charges you more for less. I would not say that the stupid Michael Jordan “Bacon Neck” commercials work on me, or that Charlie Sheen crashing his car to get to talk to a “Hanes man” appears to be a predicament I would want to be in, however there is something about those four red letter that stick out to me. Through calling assumptions into question, Klein may be trying to change convictions and give the consumer back their purchasing power that this turn towards brand image has stripped them of.

Klein bases most of her argument around “Marlboro Friday”, the Friday that Marlboro, in an effort to compete with bargain brands, slashed their prices. The slashing of prices was a sign of weakness by the most established and incessant advertising campaign of the last 40 years and showed, to some, that the brand was dead. While most overreacted to this event, brand such as Apple, Nike, and Starbucks were mapping out the blueprint to take the world by storm. So, according to Klein, Marlboro Friday marked the day where two things were created, the bargain store (Walmart is her example) and the price resistant brands (Nike, Apple, Starbucks). The fall or death of the “Marlboro Man” paints a vivid picture that almost anyone can visualize. Marlboro had become the king that was dethroned, or the champion that was upset; once the ruler of the field, now the price slashing competitor.

“Advertising” changed over time. Throughout the piece Klein slowly moves advertising from the marketing of a single product as the extension of the brand to not marketing the product at all. New strategies were required of marketing and advertising agencies because of how the landscape changed. Consumers were no longer concerned with the individual product, but what the brand as a whole represented. Corporations no longer needed a marketing firm to inform the public that a new product was being unveiled or released, they needed the firm to convince the consumer that it was their duty, to maintain their association with the brand, to find out on their own.

In my eyes, Marlboro was the first brand to have “fanboys”. The marketing of the brand versus the actual cigarette, which is almost impossible to market, created a wave of people flocking to the actual image of the “Marlboro Man”. Why else would Nike pay Kobe Bryant and Lebron James tens of millions of dollars a year, EACH?! Not only does Nike generate fanboys of their own, but they inevitably inherit Kobe and Lebron’s fanboys by selling their shoes and shirts. Apple has people marking days on their calendar for the release of new information about products, not even the release of the products themselves. They have people paying for admission to conventions and lining up for days to buy their products. They have created a brand for fans to cling to and fetishize, as opposed to creating products that have limited shelf life and can have limited functionality. Products can become irrelevant, but if the brand stays relevant, the products produced by that brand always maintain a level of desirability.

2010-08-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

Dale this is for you! (and whomever else this may inspire)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niexAyXx860&feature=player_embedded

Last Class Potluck Spreadsheet

2010-08-10T15:31:00.001-07:00

Hey Everyone,

As you all know Dale is going to be giving his last lecture at Cal on Thursday. To celebrate his accomplishments, as well as the turning in of our papers :), there will be a potluck. I have created an online spreadsheet so that everyone that wants to contribute to the festivities can make sure that we have all the necessary supplies as well as having a diversity of treats! Things that are needed include, but are not limited to:

Napkins
Cups
Drinks
Plates
Snacks

Happy writing folks!

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtYhsSKWdXXPdGFIS21Rekszcl9XVHNNU09mT25Fbnc&hl=en&authkey=COW4la4F

Best,

Parth

To semicolon or not to semicolon, that is the question.

2010-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, I was wondering if there should be a semicolon between human and transforming in this sentence:

In John Carpenter’s 1988 action thriller “They Live”, greed has lead to a complete inversion of what is considered human transforming those who are biologically human into a low class group of sub-humans... I'm usually good with this, but I can't figure it out this time. Thanks

Precis: A Plea for Earthly Sciences

2010-08-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

This public oration was and still is addressing the current mode of our scientific/technological stage of modernism. More specifically, Latour speaks to a general audience (scientists, engineers, lawyers, professors, philosophists, laymens, or any citizen) and the modern sociologists. I separate out sociologists because Latour entreats the current sociologists to gain a new perspective to what sociology should be addressing in the new era of technological progressivism.
The introduction of his speech is carried by a reference to the book The Revenge of Gaia and the Retreat of Dunkirk. This science fiction narrative enlightens and alerts Latour of “another war, the one that humans, as a whole, wage, without any explicit declaration, against Gaia” (Gaia being Earth). And through this novel Latour speaks of his greater concern that humans currently living in this urgent predicament, or rather Earthlings, need to reevaluate the definition of “social connections.”

Latour argues that today’s idea of the social science is linked to the moment in history of “modernization and emancipation.” He takes the polemical stance that as much as humans have been concerned about progression (modernizing or emancipating), we have become blinded to our distancing from the very source that lets us live—Earth. And through our hastiness, we have unveiled, rather made “explicit,” the contingent and cumbersome ties we blindly ignored. Eventually he begins to define what social science is and has been, then argues for what social scientists should focus on in the rapidly changing era.

He defines the current “social” as, “a domain among others non-social ones,” and poses the social in which, “establishes connections, associations, collections, whatever the name, between all sort of heterogeneous domains, none of them being “social” in the first meaning of the word.” Then he bluntly states that duty as a sociologist is not only to limit themselves to the first definition (which he derides), but also include the associations that bind all non-social ties together. He argues that sociologists have become content with the first definition because they have shirked off responsibilities to understand and bring forth the causal connections from one scientific discovery to “non-social” ties. In effect, “by failing to give a social explanation of science and technology, we got rid of social connections altogether.”

After laboriously elaborating his definition of “durable associations,” Latour suggests that the new objective for the modern-day sociologist is to pay attention to the, “shifting attachments offered by various non-social modes of connections.” Essentially his argument for the redefining of sociology lies in the adverb. He stresses that, “that there are no independent domains,” rather everything is relational and should be carried out in a relational manner; legally, scientifically, religiously, technically, etc. Basically, any field should not only stress itself without relating to another.

Latour further exhorts the social sciences to free themselves from the jaded idea of empiricism and adopt the empiricism that also includes the undeniable part of pure experience—sensory inputs that creates relations in the human mind. Latour denotes that, “For reasons that are due to the Modernist settlement, the social sciences, as a rule, accepted to limit experience to the incredibly narrow confines of objects without relations.”

Latour finishes his piece by connecting the desperate and urgent need for sociologist to encumber themselves with a new task. Sociologists must become critics of this age and notify other Earthlings of the, “strange modernist utterly archaic globe.”
While this oration is specifically catered to the community of sociologists, this speech is oriented to all individuals who live in this technologically advancing world. It’s true that Latour realizes the sociologist’s dichotomy: to have a field of its own and transfer the burden of giving the social explanation of science and technology to scientists. Hence, the speech in which he has clear exhortations for sociologists to have a more critical, intensive, and new perspective of the importance of sociology. However, when Latour solicits his audience for the 2nd definition of social, “connections, associations, collections, whatever the name, between all sort of heterogeneous domains, none of them being “social” in the first meaning of the word,” he is ultimately soliciting every individual to have a more wholistic and relational approach to whatever they are studying; hence the “associativeness” he endlessly argues for in any domain of study.

In conclusion, Latour has highlighted that while science and its hope in empiricism has shed considerable light onto human lives, it has put into shadows and obscurity relations that every advancement has on every non-human object. Although science has had a grip on society as the “truth-teller,” it has also nurtured many individuals who solely believe in narrow empiricism as the guide for social explanations. However, through my own experience, I have reconciled the necessity for the individual to evaluate technological advancements in relation to any other field or domain. Because without this type of critical individual, the narrative of Gaia’s wrath is bound to happen sooner than we can say, “it was just a metaphor.”

Samuel Oh

Precis on Michel Foucault's What is an Author?

2010-08-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

In What is an Author?, Foucault seeks to identify the significance of the author and how an author exists through his or her writings. He begins his essay by explaining how the concept of the “author” has evolved throughout history, and proceeds by citing Beckett. After some explanation, Foucault concludes that an author must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing. Although he acknowledges that philosophers and critics have taken note of the disappearance or “death” of the author, Foucault brazenly asserts that the topic at hand hasn't been adequately addressed.

He first examines the difficulty in universality of the term 'work' by questioning the extent to which a text can be considered a work. Then he moves on to explain the “notion of writing” and its contribution to the author's disappearance. “Writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity”(Foucault, 208).

Furthermore, Foucault addresses the complexity of the author's proper name in relation to the works created and concludes that “an author's name is not simply an element in a discourse...it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function”(Foucault, 210). Foucault then goes on to explain the concept of the “author function” with four main characteristics: 1) it is linked to the legal system and arises as a result of the need to punish those responsible for transgressive statements 2) it doesn't affect all texts in the same way 3) it is more complex than it appears to be 4) the term “author” doesn't only refer to a real individual. Following his analysis, Foucault highlights the fact that society uses the same methods to determine the author of an unknown work as the manner that was originally derived from Christian tradition.

Nearing the conclusion of the essay, Foucault asserts that the author is part of a large system of beliefs that serve to limit and restrict meaning, and ultimately concludes that the “author function” may soon disappear.

This text, I believe, is intended for a scholarly audience that is well versed in academic works such as those of Marx and Derrida. From the onset of this work, Foucault's intellectual diction is very evident. I personally had a dictionary nearby to look up words such such as 'scansion' and 'transcendental.' In addition to high level diction, the citations of works such as Bacon's Organon and Aristotle's Analytics are evidence of works being cited to allure to a particular scholastic audience. Foucault anticipates and addresses possible rebuttals and criticisms to his claims in his text and acknowledges that his argument is intended to address a narrow and specific scope of the definition of 'author'. He writes, “No doubt, analysis could discover still more characteristic traits of the author function. I will limit myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important” (Foucault, 216)

I thought that Foucault's writing on the concept of what defines a 'work' was quite interesting and intriguing. Where do we draw the line between what constitutes a work versus just a scribble? Are only certain people that are considered “authors” eligible to create works? If so, are all their thoughts and writings considered works? Before reading this text, I didn't even consider the difficulty in trying to define something as simple, or so I thought, as a “work”. As Foucault writes, “The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.” (Foucault , 208)

However, I disagree with Foucault's conclusion that Saint Jerome's four criteria of authenticity define the four modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author function into play. More specifically, I disagree with the following criteria that Saint Jerome makes:

“...; (2) the same should be done [withdrawn from the list of the author's works] if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence)...”

When I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was Plato. His viewpoints seem to evolve, and in some instances, contradict his earlier works. Based on Saint Jerome's paradigm, Plato cannot be the author of both works.

Ultimately, Foucault's work provided some new insight on the significance of the “author” in a literary context. Although I don't agree with all of the points made in this essay, this is undoubtedly a well-written and well thought out analysis.

By: Parth Bhatt

Emergency Office Hours T/W

2010-08-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,

I'm planning on holding office hours this week in case anyone wants to discuss the final essay. I'll be available in front of Dwinelle Hall at 2pm on Tuesday and Wednesday. Also, if anyone wants to talk after class about their papers, feel free to detain me on Tuesday before I head home.

Um. . .this might be of interest?

2010-08-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

Office Hours

2010-08-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

Hello to all!

Online Office Hours

2010-08-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm arriving here a bit early this time -- last time around I was late by nearly an hour, it seems only fair. Say hello as you arrive...

Precis for C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man"

2010-08-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

In C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, the key argument revolves around the claim that Man’s conquest of Nature, which is the power of some men over others, to be the progress of applied science. “Man’s power is a power possessed by some men, which they may or may not allow other men to profit by.” This piece seems to be pitched for future generation audiences warning them about the hazardous effects of technological advancements. The more power we develop through the use of applied science, the more some men will misuse the power against other men. And this has an ultimate outcome: the downfall of Man.

The political nature of the argument is seen in the discussion of Conditioners. These small groups of men have the power to make other men do what they please. “By eugenics, pre-natal conditioning, and an education [scientific] and propaganda based on perfect applied psychology, man will obtain full control over himself.” Conditioners are said to be creatures motivated by their own pleasures, who subject the entire human race to their every whim.

“Man’s conquest of Nature means the rule of hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men,” with future generation being subordinate to the power of earlier generations. The argument seems to advocate people revoking their support for so much technological advancement through science because the more progress and development that is achieved, the more Man’s downfall seems to come at hand. Advancements seem to work against Man as well as work for the convenience of Man.

The moral and ethical nature of the pieces is clear with the discussion of the Tao. The Tao, which is also known as Natural Law, Traditional Morality, First Principles of Practical Reason, or First Platitudes, is used as a main system of values that “provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and those being ruled.” Any new or existing system of values consists of fragments of the Tao; and his use of figurative language helps to convey this universal system everyone can embrace, such as the metaphor explaining our intrinsic separation from the values of the Tao comparing to the branch trying to separate itself from the tree.

Men who follow the Tao have power over themselves (self-control), but men who stray from the teaching of the Tao become subject to Conditioners. Interestingly, however, Conditioners are able to create the type of Tao system the human race will have to follow, so there is no real escape from their desire to fulfill their own selfish pleasures. And Man’s conquest over himself will be due to the rule of these conditioners over their subjects.

Repudiation vs. Remaking: Gilroy on the Postcolonial Racism Discourse

2010-08-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

"Articulating anti-racist hope in anything other than its negative moment: that is, as a creative conjuring with the possibility of better worlds rather than embattled critcism of this comprehensively disenchanted one"
The central point of contention for Gilroy as he reflects on post-colonial manifestations of race is how we confront in the present day the extraordinary bias of history that has led to the racial dichotomy of colored/white. Gilroy sees two approaches available: simply refute the idea of the negative image of oneself that is termed the Other and the sort of c0-dependent racism it hinges upon, or, to embark upon a project of the "unmaking of racialized bodies". Both of these methods, however, rely on the sort of racial absolutism that Gilroy rejects and utilize it in a clinical and subordinating fashion in which an unknown de-racializing force (the people? but if so what segments of the people have access to the institutions that allow them a greater voice?) deconstructs the dichotomy of race perceptions.

"The work Fanon described as 'dis-alienation', by which he meant the unmaking of racialized bodies and their restoration to properly human modes of being in the world."
This passage encapsulates the danger of Gilroy's project, in which it can be characterized not as a de-racializing mission but as a sort of gentrification of the Other. The "unmaking" connotes a forceful contact and resetting of the racialized bodies, while the project of "restoring" them to "properly human modes of being" assumes a meta-Creator vantage over these bodies, and the criteria for what is a proper mode of being such as to confer humanness relies entirely upon a Hegelian system that delineates moral and social superiority along a developmental trajectory that inevitably leads to the glorification of western European sensibilities. Viewed in these terms, Gilroy has taken Fanon's work of dis-alienation and used it as a new ground for racial imperialism.

"The character of racial and ethnic groups is seen to be at stake in attempts to overthrow [the political order of race]"
The central dilemma of repudiation vs. remaking hinges in this quote upon the meaning of character: whether it is taken to stand for tradition, heritage, cultural disposition, etc or whether it implies a sort of anti-matter or negative character, in which the defining character of all racial and ethnic groups is precisely their lack of a singular ethnic character leading all of their members to be directly ushered into the "global humanity", but albeit as rootless individuals left to stand alone against the crush of global capitalism.

"He calls this object 'The World.'"
Although I struggle to place this quote firmly into a spot in the argument, it remains for me the single most important line of the text. It has a rather impacting brevity, and even though it is a citation of W.E.B. Dubois in a section that is summarizing one of Dubois' books I feel as if Gilroy is attempting to lead the reader to a broader application of the Dubois text to his thesis beyond what is provided in Gilroy's explicit analysis. For context: the above quote follows a section in which Gilroy writes that Dubois did not address The Souls of Black Folks exclusively to an American audience (and its form of racism) but that it had a greater intention of "worldliness" and was "also aimed beyond those authorities to another constituency". It is this object, the greater constituency, that Dubois then terms "The World". Dubois' intention of the usage of "The World" seems rather obvious under these terms, but as I continued to read the article this single line kept appearing as the conclusive subtext and it gradually assumed Gilroy's authorial voice for me, and so I shall treat it as such. Even though I still don't know what Gilroy would wish it to mean. The terms that are open to ambiguity are the nature of the "He" and "this object". The "He" seems to reference either the racial dichotomy-repudiating individual, the remade individual, or the individual whose time and place have not progressed in the least from the colonial paradigm. The "object" for each of these entities then becomes respectively either a)the new terms of a humanity that is defined by intersectionality rather than duality, b) oneself, as an individual bled of all racial categories but nonetheless still fabricated by a humanist intellectual project, or c) the same overtly and intractably racist colonial world in which the colored individual is defined access to the World and at this imposed distance from it names it as an object rather than a lived reality. Additionally, it seems that for the repudiating and remade individual, one must at a certain point transition from viewing "The World" as an object and instead transpose onself as a subject (complete with the whole humanness as prescribed by "The World") into this World. And, for a parting tangent, there's some nice Derrida-esque interpolation in the calling of the object and "The World"'s resumed response to this naming. Does this mean that the various forms of "The World", with its particular institutions and moral discourses and conceptions of what humanness and an emancipated self contains, itself a subject of the imagination?

Katrina Sabatier
(absent 8/4 when Gilroy was discussed)

2010-08-07T16:23:00.000-07:00

Decided I felt like reviewing Osamu Tekuza's Metropolis while reading 'cyborgs', and actually ended up stumbling on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NmvqkQX03A&feature=related

(@approx. 03:20-09:30)

Where a character, made in Donna Haraway's likeness, propounds on issues in anthropomorphization and beyond..

beastializing discourse/signs

2010-08-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

at a counter-protest to prop 8:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/05/anti-gay-protesters-getti_n_671342.html#s123002

Precis for Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"

2010-08-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

by Michael Bench

Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. The State, for Althusser, is the kind of governmental formation that arises with capitalism; a state is determined by the capitalist mode of production and formed to protect its interests. It is historically true that the idea of nations as discrete units is coterminous with capitalism. It is also possible that democracy, as an ideology and/or a governmental form is also coterminous with capitalism, as democracy gives the "illusion" that all people are equal, and have equal power.

Althusser mentions two major mechanisms for insuring that people within a State behave according to the rules of that State, even when it's not in their best interests (in regards to their class positions) to do so. The first is what Althusser calls the RSA, or Repressive State Apparatuses, that can enforce behavior directly, such as the police, and the criminal justice and prison system. Through these "apparatuses" the state has the power to force you physically to behave. More importantly for literary studies, however, are the second mechanism Althusser investigates, which he calls ISAs, or Ideological State Apparatuses. These are institutions which generate ideologies which we as individuals (and groups) then internalize, and act in accordance with. Ideology is a structure, its contents will vary, you can fill it up with anything, but its form, like the structure of the unconscious, is always the same. And ideology works "unconsciously."

Althusser's first premise or thesis is that "Ideology is a 'representation' of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real conditions of existence." He begins his explanation of this pronouncement by looking at why people need this imaginary relation to real conditions of existence. Why not just understand the real.

The first answer to this question, Althusser says, comes from the 18th century, and the idea that ideology comes from priests and despots. This is basically a conspiracy theory, which says that a handful of powerful men fooled the populace into believing these (falsified) representations/ideas about the world.

The second (and, from the Marxist perspective, the right) answer is that the material alienation of real conditions predisposes people to form representations which distance them from these real conditions. In other words, the material relations of capitalist production are themselves alienating, but people can't quite deal with the harsh reality of this, so they make up stories about how the relations of production aren't so bad; these stories, or representations, then alienate them further from the real (alienating) conditions. The double distancing involved here, or the alienation of alienation, works like an analgesic, a pill, to keep us from feeling pain of alienation.

These ideas about representation and reality assume that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in ideology is the "real world," or real conditions of existence. Althusser says that ideology doesn't represent the real world per se, but human beings' relation to that real world, to their perceptions of the real conditions of existence. In fact, we probably can't know the real world directly; what we know are always representations of that world, or representations of our relation to that world. Ideology then is the imaginary version, the represented version, the stories we tell ourselves about our relation to the real world.

In more Marxist terms, what ideology does is present people with representations of their relations to relations of production, rather than with representations of the relations of production themselves.

Althusser says that ideology, as material practice, depends on the notion of the subject. Hence the two theses: "there is no practice except by and in an ideology" and "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects". There are no belief systems, and no practices determined by those belief systems, unless there is someone believing in them and acting on those beliefs.

The final part of Althusser's argument: How is it that individual subjects are constituted in ideological structures? Or, in other words, how does ideology create a notion of self or subject?

All ideology has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects--of enlisting them in any belief system, according to Althusser. That's the main thing ideology as structure and ideologies as specific belief systems do -- get people (subjects) to believe in them. There are two main points that Althusser makes about this process of becoming subjects in ideology.

1. We are born into subject-hood (if only because we're named before we're born; hence we're always-already subjects).

2. We are always-already subjects in ideology, in specific ideologies, which we inhabit, and which we recognize only as truth or obviousness.

Live feather plucking: Barbarism in the Modern Ago.活拔羽毛:現代人野蠻行徑100618,2-2

2010-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

News Item

2010-08-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

Be sure to have read both of tomorrow's pieces -- be prepared to say just what you think the thesis of each essay is before lecture begins. Lewis' piece is called the "Abolition of Man" but the topic is Man's Conquest of Nature -- Arendt's piece is called the "Conquest of Space" but the figure on which the piece turns is the precarity of the man in space. Think about these things.

Precis, They Live

2010-08-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

In the movie They Live, Carpenter asserts that the modern age of consumerism is exploiting humanity. Therein, Carpenter specifically aims to targets the basic American audience of the Reagan era in order to mobilize a critical consciousness; his argument, however, is generalized toward the common American consumer, and the deployment of the “action movie” schema as the mode further widens his audience. Therefore, Carpenter employs a Marxist critique founded in mass media in order to prove that consumer exploitation leads to deindividualization.
In order to accomplish this end, Carpenter employs dramatic irony. His film functions as an “agitprop:” it is a form of propaganda within the mainstream mass media as a modern material action movie archetype. However, this mainstream, consumer-aimed mass media tactic is exactly what Carpenter aims to argue against through his film. He critiques this propaganda through his representation of billboards, magazine advertisements, and store signs as truly saying such simple orders such as, “Obey,” “consume,” “conform,” “buy,” “submit,” “no independent thought.” Therein, by emphasizing the irony of employing the very mode he criticizes, Carpenter makes the audience aware of the efficiency and danger of the mode of mass media.
Furthermore, Carpenter utilizes allegory to prove the danger of consumerism. Within the post-coda scene of the woman having sex with an alien that she though was a man, Carpenter satirically emphasizes how the modern mass media, the agency of modern consumerism, is literally “screwing” the public. Therein, he makes a definitive argument against a society driven by consumption.
Finally, Carpenter’s employment of the metaphor of the sunglasses functions to assert that mass media creates a drone-like public where the collective, non-original thought deindividualizes the world. The image of the true consumerist world as a black and white place denounces consumerism to an evacuation of the unique aspects of life such as color and complexity. Therein, he asserts that mass media and consumerism create an indistinguishable public within a boring, anti-individual world.
Overall, Carpenter employs imagery functioning as irony, allegory, and metaphor of modern consumer culture in order to inspire a critical consciousness within the public against believing without questioning that which mass media puts forth, and further to criticize the modern consumer culture which deemphasizes individuality.

Ecce Homo Precis

2010-08-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

In Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, his argument throughout each of the four works essentially is that one could break free of the chains of the herd mentality of followers of ideological institutionality by exercising their will to power and the will to health. With the ideas of “health” and illness used throughout his essay, Nietzsche establishes both a literal register as well as a type of metaphoric tension. Using this method of approach, the provided connections are consistent with his actual mental and physical conditions, yet figuratively effective as the condition of having religious “faith” what he refers to as “error” requiring methods of ridding the body and mind of “illness.” Other arguments are made through the use of contradictions that in them contain a message for the reader. In “How One Becomes What One Is” Nietzsche begins the exploration into the self and who he is by identifying what he is not. When paired with what he claims at the end of the piece, that one cannot become what one already is, the title of the first section becomes paradoxical in nature with the concluding idea. This paradox suggests an argument that is to say that, through an examination of what one cannot be, and thus what one has not been and could not become, one arrives at what one is. This meditative exercise of one’s “will to power,” by rejection or “overthrowing” of the ideals, or “idols,” of the ideological institutions of the society in which one finds oneself, is the central theme to his work, and serves as the purpose to which Nietzsche speaks throughout his four sections of Ecce Homo. This intent is pitched primarily to an audience who Nietzsche would consider intellectually“ill” and who seek direction in life apart from the direction of essentially the path that the river current takes them. It is then clearly seen why he begins his first section of “how one becomes what one is” with a brief description of what he is not—with purpose. “I am, for example, by no means a bogey or a moralistic monster.” In saying this, he is not one to impose his morals or will on people, but he is simply “the disciple of Dionysus.” This too serves as a central argument to his works, in which the word “disciple” is a contiguous ironic trope that places Nietzsche in direct opposition to the disciple of the faith and all that goes along with it. As for what he IS, he notes that he is the resident of a place high “…among ice and high mountains...” which is an idea that serves at least two functions. Firstly, it is a reference to the idea of ascendancy through knowledge that occurs diametrically apart from faith. Secondly, it is an ironic stab at the concept of faith, or “error,” that holds ascension in high regard as an act occurring after death. In this way, the irony speaks to his argument that intellectual, cognitive, or spiritual ascension occurs right here on earth, not after we die, through the “courage” to question the aspects of life and through the gaining of knowledge; furthermore, that it is not given to us by an authority external to us.

In “Why I am So Wise,” the main argument is contained within the first body paragraph “as my own father I am dead, as my own mother I still live and grown old.” This is an argument that can be decoded yet again by paradoxical inspection. This is an argument by which he cannot “already be dead” as well as “still live,” so the reader is forced to contend with under what terms could he be dead, as relating to his father, as well as alive, relating to his mother—simultaneously. It is here, and continuously through his discussion in the two subsequent readings of Ecce Homo that he discusses the decline of his health. Granted, that he was in pretty bad shape for a large portion of his life, we as readers must try to make sense of the peculiar nature of how he intertwines his decline of “health” with the avoidance of institutional “decadence”—a recurring theme throughout his books referring to the way in which one is to exercise their “will to power” or “will to health.” An example of this can be seen when Nietzsche writes “…for with every improvement of my general bodily health came a corresponding increase of my power of vision…need I say that I am experienced in questions of decadence?“ From this he discusses three different types of sight that he acquires that alludes to the first, being of the Christian “views” of which he was brought up under by his father who was a priest, a second sight of what he has learned from the first which could be an “anti-“ decadent/Christian view, and a third of an individualistic consciousness that arises out of the juxtaposition of the previous two. Nietzsche, speaking of what he owes his father, writes “What I owe him above all this, that I do not need special intention, but merely patience, in order to voluntarily enter into a world of higher and finer things.” We know that Nietzsche, like Oscar Wilde, is the Icon of irony and a master of metaphor, so when Nietzsche is speaking to us about the patience he owes his father, about figuratively recovering from his illness that he literally never recovered from, and the ways in which we might be able to maintain our health, there might be more figurative words of wisdom that could be uncovered—or at least that’s how I saw things. J It is here that we may interpret what Nietzsche owes his father to be the patience, inspired by his religious upbringing which he alludes to as his figurative “illness” throughout the text, concluding with the realizations necessary to exercise his “will to health;” ultimately granting him his third sight. Nietzsche notes that, similarly to his father, his life declined at the age of 36. Nietzsche was born in 1844, which if “in his thirty-sixth year his health declined,” would put him in the year 1880—the time when he wrote the third addition to his Human, All Too Human called The Wanderer And His Shadow—the first of his pieces of literature that specifically targeted the “decadence” of institutionalized religion apart from the Apollonian-Dionysian distinction of Greek thematics. He undeniably alludes to this connection as he says “…I was then at my lowest ebb. The wanderer and his shadow was the product of this period. There is no doubt that I was familiar with shadows then.” It is with this in mind that a conclusion can be made that substantiates both a literal and figurative interpretation of his illness, as he also refers those others who are in intellectual “error” as “ill.” It is clear that he never got over his physical and mental illness, yet he writes “I placed myself in my own hands, I restored myself to health.” It is at least somewhat clearer now that by this contradiction, through which he invokes his central theme of the “will to health,” that we can validate the argument that a major theme in “Why I am So Wise” is the dual function of the “illness.” Not only does the “illness” serve a dual function as we have shown, but so too does the “will to health” and its components as discussed in the succeeding section of Ecce Homo. His likenesses to his priest father, and the Christian values associated with this figure, are thereby dead through the metaphorical function of his own restoration to health. Perhaps it was because Nietzsche was able to take the severity and, shall we say, “gnarliness” of his true physical and mental illness, and turn it into a new language, through which he could connect his readers to his critique on ideological institutions, that allows us to see deeper into why he is so wise.

The logical extension of the argument of the last section of Ecce Homo regarding the “illness” can be seen in “Why I Am So Clever.” This is an argument in which Nietzsche breaks down the components to his will to health. This is a section within which he prescribes his remedy for what he alludes to as the “illness” of Christian morality being “ye shall not think!” The first of these components is with regard to “…the question of nutrition.” Food is definitely a critical means of achieving and maintaining good health, but if we dig deeper into the figurative nature of Nietzsche’s suggestion, we uncover that this is not simply “The Nietzsche Diet Plan.” Nietzsche tells us that the food he had eaten “up to a very mature age …was quite badly expressed in moral terms, it was ‘impersonal,’ ‘selfless,’ altruistic,’ to the glory of cooks and other fellow-Christians.” It is here that the reader gets a sense of the figurative nature of Nietzsche’s ideas of proper digestion and the upkeep of the body and mind through the “Will to Health.” Nietzsche provides the reader with ideas that convey literal meanings of food consumption, but can be interpreted as notions that stress the importance of one’s will to ingest anything one chooses to and the direct influence of those things ingested and their effect on the body, mind, and soul. It is indeed clever how Nietzsche can speak to us in this way when he notes that he is therefore “an opponent of vegetarianism,” given that “A heavy meal is digested more easily than one that is too meager. The first condition of a good digestion is that the stomach should be active as a whole. Therefore a man ought to know the size of his stomach.” If we maintain that Nietzsche is speaking to his readers in this figurative catachrestic fashion, then this passage serves as the necessity for one to know the capacity of his mind before accepting information of little to no substance that might work against him, than of the “heavier” type of information of which is sought out on one’s own that overwhelms him and favors him—as is the case with literal digestion. Nietzsche continues to oppose the consumption of alcohol for substituting it for water; for “water answers the same purpose” of thirst but, unlike the wine and what wine metaphorically represents, does not disorient the body and souls in which it is being digested. This figuratively shows the effect that occurs within the body when consuming “substantial” information that shares the same qualities of water—such information that is clear, simple, yet beautifully fluid and understandable. Relating to the metaphorical ascension up Nietzsche’s mountain, the argument here is that for one to exercise one’s “will to power” and “will to health,” one must “courageously” consume and digest a healthy serving of knowledge to stay intellectually healthy. With this in mind, it is in the most metaphorical way possible that Nietzsche stresses to the world that it is vitally important that one be aware and regulatory of the information that one digests; for one’s body, mind, soul, and “will to health” depend on this in order to treat one’s “illness.” The second component of Nietzsche’s remedy to preserve one’s “will to health” is “…closely related to that of locality and climate.” It is here that he tells us essentially that the places in which we live and the associations of people in which we emerge ourselves are entirely critical for a person’s well being; that one must not eat or live in a place that gives you inadequate food and that, by living there, makes digestion difficult. As we extract meaning from the greater power of this idea’s metaphorical meaning, however, we see that this is not simply the “Nietzsche Traveler’s Guide to Europe.” Nietzsche, by noting that “Germany, alone, is more than enough to discourage the strongest and most heroic intestines…indeed spirit itself is only a form of these bodily functions,” he alludes to his readers that where one resides is crucial to one’s spiritual soundness or “will to health.” In other words, if one is to be fully “able” to exercise one’s will to live by one’s own standards apart from religious value standards, that living in “disastrous places” that are highly religious or Christian in societal values isn’t a great idea. This indeed explains, for one, why Nietzsche roamed from city to city in Europe, and secondly, that “it was ‘illness’ that first bright [me] to reason” to relocate as such. The third component “…concerns the method of recuperation and recreation.” This component, referred to predominately as the importance of reading or “by intercourse with books,” in another imperative to establishing and maintaining optimal “health;” for it is the choice of literature that “enables me to escape.” As before, however, if the reader digs deeper into what Nietzsche is telling us, we find that this is not a subscription to a “Nietzsche Reader’s Digest.” It is the authors of not just the Bible, but also the other philosophical essays of Delacroix, Berlioz, and Wagner, that contribute to “illness” that Nietzsche argues, “…who are essentially sick and incurable” themselves. In this section the theme is that one ought to exercise one’s will to power by reading the books one wishes to read whenever they wish to read them, instead of being spoon-fed books that construct “a destiny” by the one holding the spoon. It is Wagner, however, that Nietzsche admires as “…the greatest benefactor of my life…” through what Nietzsche argues is a worthy opponent to his views. Lastly, as a part of this third segment of “Why I Am So Clever,” Nietzsche tends to the symptoms and “instincts of disease” that brings his metaphorical “illness” argument closer into focus than at any other previous point in Ecce Homo. He describes these symptoms as “fantasies…lies…all the concepts of ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘sin,’ beyond,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘eternal life’…All questions of politics, of social order, of education, have been falsified from top to bottom, because the most harmful men have taken for great men.” These are the individuals who Nietzsche, through his metaphoric approach, argues have degraded society by aggravating our intellectual digestion to which one must eat healthily to combat; who have regionally spread like a plague to which one must choose a different climate to allow one to be free from multitude; and who have produced literature that invades the body and soul to which one must choose books that free ones own mind. All of these components are metaphorically expressed by Nietzsche in a clear and powerful way that allow for one to exercise “will to health” through the practice of seeing themselves as their own “destiny.”

As the fourth and final element to Nietzsche’s argument, it is critical that one not believes in oneself but knows oneself. Through knowing oneself, Nietzsche argues that one is in control of one’s own fate and one’s destiny. In knowing his fate, Nietzsche properly titles this fourth section of Ecce Homo as “Why I Am a Fatality (or destiny).” In this sense, to know one’s fate, is to live life in a way that takes its course with the one living that life at the drivers seat. It is to not offer up their “will to life” to an external agent, nor is it to put faith in the unknown. Using himself as an example, in this section, Nietzsche need not believe in himself because he is certain of himself. This certainty, not only in oneself but also in the power one has to change the course of ones own life, is what Nietzsche defines as “the truth.” “The truth speaks out of me—But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth.” This contradiction forces the readers to critique the terms of “terrible” and “truth.” The reverse effect of what the reader would expect from these terms is induced by the equivalency between lies and truth; in doing so, anything that could be considered terrible, by a society that disguises lies for truths, becomes a thing to be desired. The unique use of the concept of “terrible” in this way fits the claim of Nietzsche’s argument—that he is the author of his own destiny. He argues further that what is considered “good” for those institutions in society that have decided what is “good” and “evil” for one and all others can only be “evil.” Nietzsche alludes to Christian morality when discussing these institutions that cause its followers to say “no” to concepts of the self. He advises “…the only good-natured herd animals…” who follow institutional doctrines to lead their own lives instead by “saying yes” to their “will to heath” and to eliminate true “evil” prevailing at the expense of “truth” and of the future. Finally, when Nietzsche explains “Christian morality has been the Circe of all thinkers so far…”he uses severely descriptive metonymical device used to further illustrate what he is arguing. It is here that contact is made between Christian morality and the beckoning seductive temptress of Greek Mythology who transforms the men that wander into her cave into pigs for her own consumption.

In conclusion, we have looked to Nietzsche’s general argument of Ecce Homo by seeking a better understanding of the figurative and literal registers of his “illness.” We have analyzed Nietzsche’s concept of “illness,” and furthermore, how one’s “will to health” might be achieved through the breaking down into its further metaphorical constituents of proper nutrition, climate/location, and recreational reading. It is the function of Ecce Homo to stimulate the reader’s sense of identity in the world apart from the chains of ideological institutions. Nietzsche’s rebirth, after the death of the Christian likenesses of his father, stimulated his will to live life as one’s own destiny and to not be mistaken for someone else.

Precis on "The Abolition of Man"

2010-08-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

C.S. Lewis, in his article entitled "Abolition of Man", discusses the present day manifestation and future progression of 'man's conquest of Nature'. Lewis first discusses the relationship between man and nature by proposing that it is a relationship based upon power. This power, however, is not exercised by every man over nature. Rather, some men possess this 'power' and do or don't allow other men to profit by it. Thus, Nature acts as the instrument through which some men exercise power over other men.

Lewis then introduces Time into his interpretation. He argues that generations exercise power over their successors by modifying the environment and architecting their descendants. Lewis states that once we have reached maximum power over the past, we will also have effectively, and drastically, reduced the power of subsequent generations.

"Abolition of Man" outlines the prominent and novel aspects of this future society. First, human power will have dramatically increased. Second, we wil begin to see a form of "conditioning" as "the Conditioners" pick and choose the motives and values that will be possessed by their descendants. Through this process, Lewis argues that "Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man." In other words, the process of conditioning renders mankind as artefacts, rather than men at all. Through "conditioning" we will have denied our descendants any remnant of humanity.

Lewis also debates the proposed nature of the conditioners. He argues that the conditioners will be motivated by pleasure, and that, by removing themselves from a structure of value judgment, they will only have the pleasure they experience to prefer any one phenomenon to any other. The only hope for future generations, then, rests upon the 'chance' of whether or not the conditioners are 'benevolent' or not. Here 'chance' means 'nature', in the sense that 'chance' will be determined by the 'natural' impulses experienced by the conditioners.

The article then turns to a discussion of nature's objects. Lewis argues that we deem objects and phenomenon 'nature' after we have conquered them. In this way, we take power from nature while at the same time "surrendering things to Nature". Because the conditioners' power will result in the giving up of mankind's souls to nature, we will become both "slaves", and conquerors, of nature. The basic gist of Lewis' argument, then, is that mankind's garnering of power through nature will culminate in our slavery through a abolition from, and degeneration of, humanity and individuality of values. In this way Lewis calls into question our assumptions regarding the merit of man's conquest of nature. He questions the societal value and repercussions of creating a dynamic between power, man, and nature.

I feel that Lewis is targeting the present day generation. At the end of his article, he discusses a new 'Natural Philosophy' that focuses upon a critical consciousness of the 'natural object'. In the interest of future generations, Lewis is asking present day readers to take the knowledge that he has offered and work to prevent the grim prescription for the future that he has offered.

An important term that Lewis works with in "The Abolition of Man" is Tao. Lewis defines Tao as "a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart". Throughout the piece, Lewis articulates a discussion centered upon the concept of Tao. Lewis argues that the future society will have all-together departed from any adherence to the traditional Tao. Rather than adhering to pre-defined teachings, the 'conditioners' will set out to create a set of values and judgments and implant, rather than transfer, them to their students.

Finally, Lewis incorporates a key use of figurative language into the text. In crafting his argument, Lewis introduces the paradox surrounding the concepts of abolition and slavery. Lewis writes that we are propelling mankind towards both of these ends. In garnering 'nature's power' we will have entered into a form of slavery that is defined by the abolition of man from traditional humanity and values. Thus, Lewis's vision for the future is marked by man's paradoxical experience of both slavery and abolition.

-Caitlin Capocci

There Should Be More Precises Posted

2010-08-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Make it so.

George Carlin found the sunglasses

2010-07-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

George Carlin on American Owners and Education

Prompts for the Final

2010-07-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

Prompt One:

To be recognized as human is to be accorded a special status, an “authentic” ethical standing, while to be dismissed as nonhuman, as subhuman, as infrahuman through racializing, sexualizing, pathologizing, infantilizing, primitivizing, or bestializing discourses is to be cast outside of culture and history, and so rendered precarious, abject. Discuss what you take to be the role of this proposition in any of the pieces we engaged with in class, especially by Adams, Althusser, Arendt, Burroughs, Butler, Carpenter ("They Live"), Fanon, Foucault, Gilroy, Haraway, Latour, Lewis, or Solanas.

Prompt Two:

The conviction that technoscientific development might achieve a level through which universal human emancipation might finally be accomplished keeps re-appearing in a number of the texts we have read over the course of the term -- from Wilde, to Marx, to Solanas (and you may well think others). The conviction that technoscientific development has arrived already at such a level but that its emancipatory promise has been diverted to the service of unjust ends re-appears in a number of others -- from Adorno, to Benjamin, to Debord, to Klein (and you may well think others). In still others -- in Barthes, again, in Adorno, in Arendt, in Fanon, in Latour, in Lewis (and you may well think others) -- we discern the concern that framing human emancipation in the instrumental terms of technoscientific development in the first place fatally deranges our grasp of and hopes for such emancipation. Through a comparison of two pieces from the course that seem to offer up conflicting views on the question, or through a reading of a single text that seems to you to exhibit ambivalence on this question, make a case that the text(s) provide an essentially progressive or an essentially reactionary view of technoscience (or instrumentality) in relation to emancipatory politics.

Solanas is Music to Our Ears

2010-07-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

The San Fran duo Matmos released a CD in 2006 entitled “The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast” which, apparently, is a line offered up to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. If you knew that, then you probably also knew he was a part of the LGBT community. In fact, so is/was every other person to whom each track on this CD is dedicated. Given there are 11 tracks, and that “Rag for William S. Burroughs” sounds a lot like fourteen minutes of rag-time and type-writing tapping, this is a hell of a concept album. Pitchfork wrote—and I agree—that it’s a CD full of “frenetic dance tracks doubling as reading lists.”

Curious? Copy and paste the youtube link below and take a listen to the track entitled “Tract for Valerie Solanas,” featuring as its lyrics excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto, which I’ve included below. I think you’ll see why this can only be described as “tunefully fractured electronic music” (again, thank you Pitchfork).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8jn3x2WmS0

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy. the male. sex."

"Destroy the male sex."

“Unable to relate or to love, the male must work. Females crave absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity, but lacking the opportunity or ability for this, they prefer to idle and waste away their time in ways of their own choosing -- sleeping, shopping, bowling, shooting pool, playing cards and other games, breeding, reading, walking around, daydreaming, eating, playing with themselves, popping pills, going to the movies, getting analyzed, traveling, raising dogs and cats, lolling about on the beach, swimming, watching TV, listening to music, decorating their houses, gardening, sewing, nightclubbing, dancing, visiting, `improving their minds' (taking courses), and absorbing `culture' (lectures, plays, concerts, `arty' movies). Therefore, many females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer living with males or peddling their asses on the street, thus having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for someone else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best -- if able to get a `good' job -- co-managing the shitpile.”

Then, in the bizarre instrumental interlude that follows, it’s pretty clear that the break on the word “shitpile” was no accident. Finally:

“If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.”

Precis on Preface: Gap Between Past and Future by Cheryl Jamison

2010-07-29T18:48:00.000-07:00

In her Preface, Hannah Arendt’s central argument deals with the responsibility of “each new generation, indeed every new human being” to “discover” and “pave” anew the gap that exists between the past and the future (13). This gap, described as a “thought-event” manifests in three-fold warfare: the struggle between the antagonistic forces of the past and the present; the struggle between man with his past; and the struggle between man with his future (10).

The preface opens with a quotation from French poet Rene Char: “our inheritance was left to us by no testament” (3). Arendt argues that “testament,” referring to tradition, ensures that possessions, valuable treasures, of a past generation are properly preserved and handed down to future generations. (Today we might use a will or living trust to ensure this process.) In short, the future, even before it had been realized, eluded man through an interval or gap in time because the past had not ensured its safe passage. This interval is an opportunity of necessity for each new generation to create its own being, its own state of existence.

The treasure, which was so valuable yet nameless, was an expression of freedom and self-realization—freedom from the encumbrances of society and the constant search of self (4). The problem, as Arendt described, is that because this treasure of freedom had not been passed down through tradition, there was no name or value assigned to it. Without this assignment of name or value, there was nothing to “think about and to remember” (6). The importance of remembrance is the necessity of a “pre-established framework of reference” (5). In other words, there must be some “thing” of assigned value—treasured possession—that attaches itself to the mind and, thereafter, is open to recollection. In fact, questions arose as to whether the treasure ever, in reality, existed. As Arendt puts it, “The tragedy began . . . when it turned out that there was no mind to inherit and to question, to think about and to remember” (6). The treasure was lost in obscurity because it had no place of “thought” in which to exist—to be known, to be recalled, and to be passed down to future generations.

Arendt argues that the gap between past and future is a “non-time-space . . . [that] can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past” (13). Her call to action, as stated previously, is that new generations must find and chart its own course. This call to action is an opportunity for continued renewal of intellectual thought that pushes each succeeding generation beyond the realm of the past.

Anyone else missing pp. 218-219 in "What is an Author?"

2010-07-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here's another version. Missing portion begins on page 154.

Sear up some heroes?

2010-07-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

2010-07-28T12:59:00.001-07:00

"The 'hippy' babbles on about individuality,but has no more conception of it than any other man. He desires to get back to Nature, back to the wilderness, back to the home of furry animals that he's one of, away from the city, where there is at least a trace, a bare beginning of civilization, to live at the species level, his time taken up with simple, non-intellectual activities -- farming, fucking, bead stringing. The most important activity of the commune, the one upon which it is based, is gang-banging. THe 'hippy' is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussy -- the main commodity to be shared, to be had just for the asking, but, blinded by greed, he fails to anticipate all the other men he has to share wtih, or the jealousies and possessiveness for the pussies themselves."

Brilliant.

A Precis: "On Coincidence" and "Immortality"

2010-07-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

Burroughs argues, in both essays, for the abandonment of the "dead dogma" of religion in favor of dreamful and artistic space exploration.
There is a social commentary to both essays, seemingly both heartfelt and, at least at times, sardonic or wry. In "On Coincidence," religion and to some degree academia (philosophy, sociology, and psychology, in particular) are under fire. "Immortality" remarks mostly upon scientific/medicinal ethics, capitalism, and, briefly, Christianity. Citations array from Korzybski's classroom to The Methusala Enzyme, from Plato's Republic to The Boulder Camera. Burroughs tampers with his citations, substituting words within quotes ("wrong" for "long", for example) and rewriting entire scenes or plots. His own writing, plot lines, metaphors, and citations cut into each other and clash without compromise.

“On Coincidence”:
Observes that characterizing the unexpected or hard to explain as coincidence is comforting. Coincidence adamantly relies on faith.
"All thinking is wishful."
Characterizations of truth are also volatile, but they vitalize statements.
Christ spoke the truth of "the non-dominant brain hemisphere."
Julian Jaynes: The voice of a priest-king was heard by all subjects until 1000 B.C.
Science induces voices through electrostimulation.
Arthur C. Clarke: Religious origins of language, absoluteness and the definite article
Korzybski: We are still in a "platonic cave."
Scientific truths: Impossibilities validated by "the human nervous system that made and recorded the measurements," black holes beyond the scope of truths and certainty
Magical truth: Will as reigning force, the Company's magic push or pull, "lightning usually strikes more than once in the same place," the "synchronicity" of daily life
A lesson in magical truth: "Your surroundings are your surroundings. They relate to you."
Creativity as prefatory space exploration, "leave the Word-God behind."

“Immortality”:
A fitful scenario of science fiction tangled in science fact. The facts are organ transplant, cloning, and the organ trafficking that actually takes place under regulation and in the black market; the fiction is a caricatural portrait of these facts, a grisly system of immortality.
"Mr. Rich Parts" is, at first, a horrible quilt of replaced body parts. Then transplant methodology is inverted, bodies are left intact, egos are taken out and inserted into new ones.
Morality is capitalism: the successful are right; the poor, the dead are wrong.
Mentase: the youth enzyme, stolen from the young to give to the old, without the enzyme the young age rapidly, a vampiric Mentase addiction results.
Egos are "helpful little visitors," the ego is a defensive reaction and a fallacy.
"Take fifty photos of the same person over an hour."
Cloning: "the end of the ego," human as artifact
"'The thought of human non-selfness is terrifying!'"
David Rorvik: Max and Dr. Darwin popping clones
The future is "increased flexibility, capacity for change and ultimately, mutation."
Dreams: a warm-blooded necessity, sexual, travel in time, "train the being for future conditions," art as waking life correlate.
"The human artifact is biologically designed for space travel."

Precis on SCUM Manifesto

2010-07-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

My first impressions on Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto were that it was a ludicrous, bizarre, and fallacious attack on the male sex. I have undertaken this precis to see what kind of sense I can garner from this essay.

The essay begins by bringing up the inherent advantage that women have over men because of an increased number of chromosomes, and then goes to show how this causes men to want more than anything else in their lives to be female. However, men, in an attempt to hide this jealousy of females, instead indulge in an elaborate scheme to hide their true ambitions, so that they seem "manly". This includes them architecting an economy in which they are the male breadwinners, mainly so they feel as they have a purpose in life. After it has been established that males are completely lacking and have only one superiority over females (to convince females that men are women and women are men), it moves on to demonstrate how SCUM will work to change this and create a society where women are the leaders and citizens, while males are allowed to "sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and ride the waves to their demise."

Solanas was an interesting character, a schizophrenic woman best known for her attempt to murder Andy Warhol. Sexually abused as a child, she lived as a prostitute and beggar, and years after writing SCUM Manifesto claimed that it was not to be taken literally. Based on her murder attempt and other stalker acts that earned her many years in prison and that demonstrate her mental instability, it is difficult to ascertain whether she truly meant that SCUM Manifesto was to be taken literally, or merely to kindle discussion over feminism.

SCUM Manifesto is an entreaty to all women that they realize the current domination that the inherently unsuperior male race has over them, and for this reason, I would assume that the audience she wishes to attract is any and all women. At one point she elaborates upon the Men's Auxiliary of SCUM "who are working to diligently eliminate temselves," so one may assume that she also would like to attract a male audience. However, if men are endowed with the great power of convincing women otherwise of whatever womenconceive, perhaps she does not wish to attract a male audience so that they cannot work against the SCUM movement, which is supposed to be "furtive, sneaky, and underhanded."

Solanas makes this argument to more than call into question the female's role in society, but rather, to impress upon the audience female superiority. She is taking feminism to a whole new level, and rather than advocating for equal rights, she is advocating for a society in which women are the only worthwhile part.

The thesis that Solanas provides for the work is conveniently provided in the first sentence: "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the moneysystem, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." Solanas argues for the need for females to seize governmental power and institute a female-dominated system, as the current system is centered around the concept that men are trying to hide their want and need to be female.

Solanas' argument revolves around the general warrant that males are a biological accident, "a walking abortion," who are missing a chromosome. She states, "maleness is a deficiency disease." Taking this as truth, she goes on to describe how this deficiency in chromosomes causes men to be unfit for any role in society. However, this argument cannot be taken as truth. It could just as easily be said that females are overdeveloped males, who rather than have a deficiency in chromosomes, have an excessive number. It is of note that people with down syndrome suffer from an extra chromosome. Using this argument, one could say that females too suffer from a smaller mental capacity and inherent disadvantages. A second assumption made by Solanas is that the only superiority that males have over females is that to be able to convince the population that men are women and women are men. If men have this ability to convince with such success that our whole society revolves around this one simple superiority, it seems to imply that the superiority of being able to convince others is the most important of them all, as it ultimately decides how our society functions.

Although Solanas' piece could be seen as a crazy interpretation of the ills in our society, it is very well organized, with a step by step argument that does seem coherent with the basic assumptions she sets forth in the beginning of this piece. It seems to be influenced by Adorno and Horkheimer, especially in the realm of automation to create more leisure time; she states, "There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the very most. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything as she wants." She proposes a society wherein money has been eliminated, and machines take a prominent role.

However, it is interesting that Solanas also proposes a true democracy, where "it will be possible for every woman to vote directly on every issue by means of an electronic voting machine in her house." She is proposing equality among all females.

Finally, I think it is interesting to compare SCUM Manifesto with the movie "They Live." In "They Live," those who wear the glasses see that the zombies are not fit for their society and must be killed. They respond to the problem of the zombies by violent shooting and attacks. In the same way, those who understand that women are inherently superior to men and that men must be eliminated from society, join SCUM, who will "keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up, and killing until the money-work system no longer exists and automation is completely instituted or until enough women co-operate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals." Regardless of the men who perhaps are not aggressively supporting the current society, until completely control has been established by SCUM, violence will be used to control the male population and men will be endangered. SCUM is also sneaky like the Zombies were in "They Live," as SCUM "will always aim to avoid detection and punishment."

Another interesting comparison to draw is that of males with the spectacle. In the same way that the spectacle causes people to move farther away from being to seeming, in the same way, males cause females to lose track of who they are and lets them fall into the role of Daddy's Girl. Spectacle, when seen under the eyes of mass culture, is deceptive, working towards people forgetting and denying what they are truly involved in. Males have caused females to be convinced that they are not superior, losing in the same way what they are for what seems to be.

SCUM Manifesto was a fascinating read, even if it revolved around untrue assumptions and was a bizarre read. Like "The Pyschotic Doctor Scherber," even though it teetered on the edge of being acceptable as an argument, it was very entertaining despite its horrific attack on the male sex.

Precis on 'On Coincidence'

2010-07-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

William Burroughs sets out his piece talking about religion. How Christ heard God’s Voice, but how the non-dominant brain hemisphere only created that voice. In modern times Christ would have been institutionalized. Someone claiming they hear a voice? Someone who says that they can heal people? Do we not laugh at them and eventually lock them up because ‘they can be a danger to themselves and to others’. Burroughs seems to slightly mock this form of what he calls ‘religious truth’, which is too absolute. He then goes on to talk about ‘scientific truth’, which according to him is too black and white. A scientist saying that something is ‘impossible’ is again an absolute statement. Burroughs would like to argue for another truth; the ‘magical truth’. This does not include Harry Potter waving around a wand, but it does explain coincidence. Because according to Burroughs we all have a certain mental power with which we can influence the world around us, like the CIA pushing a guy in front of a van with a ‘magical push’. This leads him to his main point, “lightning usually strikes more than once in the same place.” One incident can cause another similar incident to take place, not only at the same location but also with the same person. An example he gives: “If you start the day by missing a train, this could be a day of missed trains and missed appointments.” Now I have to say that (but maybe this is just in Holland) the reason your whole day is filled with missed trains and missed appointments is because the train network sucks and if you miss your first train, you will most likely not be able to catch any of your other connections resulting in you being late at least an hour and missing your appointments.
Let’s move on though. Burroughs claims that by thinking certain things, we induce events around us, we see signs on the street because we were thinking a certain thing. We create the world around us. Now the last paragraph of ‘On Coincidence’ reveals his reason for writing this piece, to convert Christians and Muslims. We need to “leave the Word-God behind.” I have to say, I am always in for a good discussion about faith and why someone (or me) would be religious and if you have good arguments I can be swayed to change my mind slightly. (You can’t really talk me out of being religious though, but you can try.) But Burroughs here tries to convert Christians and Muslims by offering up another truth, a ‘magical truth’ which seems even more farfetched. We do not see a sign on the street because the sign is there and we happened to look in that direction, no, we see it because we were thinking a certain thing. There is one point in the essay where I feel like Burroughs leaves a link open for religion to bond with the ‘magical truth’. He says: “… the assumption that nothing happens in this universe (…) unless some entity wills it to happen.” The question is, why can’t this entity be God? Burroughs however, does not supply us with an answer.
I almost felt at the end, that Burroughs was simply mocking religion the whole way through by coming up with this ‘magical truth’ to show the ridiculousness of believing in something greater. But to be honest, (and after some googling) I believe that he was serious and that he truly believes in this ‘magical truth’. And I have to say, who am I to argue with him? After all, I believe in someone who in modern times would have been institutionalized.

Martine

Question to Mid-Term Post 3

2010-07-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

Hi Prof Dale,

I had a question on prompt #3.

Prompt Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.” How and why does the figure of Schreber seem to pose such a challenge to Freud’s larger effort to portray the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber’s own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Why might this matter so much to Freud in the first place?

I was not sure what you were asking for in the second question, "Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber's own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Could you please clarify what you mean by 'play out this ambivalence to Schreber's own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it?'

sam

P*$$y Envy

2010-07-26T00:47:00.000-07:00

After reading so much patriarchal dogma that comes flowing out of such great minds in Philosophy and Critical Theory, it is nice to see all of that flipped on its head for a second. Valerie’s SCUM Manifesto’s argument is to break down the system of domination through women pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and realizing their own power.

Valerie seems to not have any particular audience except for the world she feels is caught in this backward understanding of power dynamics between truth and reality. She addresses no gender/sex in particular but does give some direction to certain archetypes of people that exist in society.

Although I love Valerie’s espousal of feminist independence and power, her supporting reasoning that brings her to the social revolution she advocates is complete misandry. Beginning with the reasoning that men are incomplete people because they have the Y chromosome (which is an incomplete X, missing the fourth leg) falls so closely akin to Freud’s women and their penis envy that I knew it either had to be satire or grossly missing a larger picture of relationships, culture, sexuality, and gender. But in putting all that aside, her argument fights tooth and nail to prove the male inferiority and how that relationship has played out into a world where men try to take over through domination, violence and sex because of their ‘lack’ (to tip my hat to Lacan). In this patriarchal system men have also convinced women to be subservient and have subjected them to the role they find themselves in today through much institutionalization. If taken all reasoning to be true in her argument, here would be the crack in the dam; if men were so lowly and incapable of thought and feeling (like she claims multiple times, in multiple ways) there is no reasoning why the higher-being, AKA: ‘woman,’ would take to such subjugation. (At this point, that’s neither here nor there). The way to fight against the system though is to become SCUM, a Society for Cutting Up Men, to stop participating in the society the way it wants us to, vehemently. To stop buying, to be brash and crude, to loot, to destroy cars and businesses, to burn and pillage, to “couple-bust” and disrupt all that we have known to be good, normal, and comfortable-and adopt a new reality.

Through violence and everything that is the opposite of what feminine is, women should live for themselves, and only themselves. Creating, through the gathering of strong, dominant, independent women (and the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM), a new society. Divorcing oneself from the man-hate (which weighed against the amount of misogyny that has to be excused), the revolution that Valerie espouses is not so much about the man/woman binary but about the system itself, which falls akin to many-a-Marxist.

Amber Grimaldi

Tap tap tap... is thing on?

2010-07-25T14:02:00.001-07:00

Is anybody still around?

Office with Dale

2010-07-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Okay so I'm a bit rusty at blogging . . . does anyone see this?

2010-07-23T20:46:00.000-07:00

Warhol had this to say about the attack: "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there.." -- Although there is nothing apparently comical about this statement, I still managed to find myself laughing aloud.

Magnetic Fields "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure"

2010-07-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

Some Thoughts on "No Logo"

2010-07-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

Klein’s thesis is that a massive cultural shift began in the 1980’s and 90’s, when successful companies learned to “brand” rather than advertise. The late eighties saw a sea-change in the way that products were sold, because the most effective brands sold “experiences” rather than products. Companies that understood this thrived and still dominate- these include Apple, Disney, Nike and Starbucks. Companies that did not understand this sold less and were weaken in the economic downturn of 2000.

Klein makes her argument primarily to call attention to a state of affairs. Her audience would also have observed at least part of what she describes. She never urges her reader to take a course of action – which might be a bitter pill when one considers that brand choice often has to do with self-identity.

In “No Logo” Naomi Klein argues that products are most effectively sold not through advertising, but through branding.

Kleins’s audience is young, and perceives itself and hip and sophisticated.
Klein establishes her credibility through her knowledge of historic developments, and establishes reader sympathy by discussing events with an ironic tone. Klein pitches her argument to the same people to whom many of the “brands” pitch. She calls Wal-mart “deeply unhip” and later makes a hipster joke by calling Nike and Adidas “sneaker pimps” – a reference to a band from the early nineties that her readers would likely have been familiar. She makes allusive jokes that both further her argument and encourage the reader to identify with her. In fact, in the last paragraph she writes, “Never again would the corporate world stoop to praying at the altar of the commodity market. From now on they would worship only graven media images.” implying that just like “the chosen people” in the desert, corporations would now worship the true G-d of branding.

Pardon the irrelevance

2010-07-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

"It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzsche's philosophy."

- Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer

Naomi Klein Precis

2010-07-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

In her excerpt from her book No Logo, Naomi Klein traces the function of corporation from product-producer to culture-creator. Branding, Klein argues, facilitated this movement.

Klein discusses how "the making of things remained, at least in principle, the heart of all industrialized economies" in the early to mid-20th century. Marx had discussed earlier that products were drained of their historicity in the Fetishized Commodity, and arguably, the products themselves became indistinguishable from one another because of this. This may explain why criticisms emerged of the corporate structure -- they were "bloated [and] oversized," and this oversized-ness did not necessarily lead to more sales or better products but rather served as a "liability" for the CEO. Thus, corporations shrunk their literal space by moving labor overseas (as a result of trade liberalization and labor-law reform), and expanded into the public-space in the form of advertising. More insidious, as Klein argues, was the corporate expansion into the realm of idea and thought through the process of branding.

Since products were "virtually indistinguishable from one another," the corporation took on the role of creating an artificial historicity that would not be embedded into the product that it was selling, but rather into the structure of the corporation itself. Marlboro Friday struck fear into the hearts of corporations, thinking that branding had hit its peak, since consumers were readily willing to buy "private" products for a cheaper price, "claiming, heretically, that they couldn't tell the difference [between products]." However, the "abstract and unquantifiable brand name" was much more powerful than some corporations had presumed, as long as branding did not stop at mere advertising into the public space. The advertising must also exist within every element of the corporation itself, whether it was the sleek, pseudo-futuristic, pristine white interior of an Apple store (albeit those stores are hella sexy), the friendly, smiling "barista" at your local Starbucks overjoyed by her $6/hour salary, or the cheerful singing cluster of Coldstone Creamery employees, returning their gratitude for your ever-so-generous contribution of a $1 tip. Put another way, corporate structures, in order to be fully branded, must "argue" that an experience is interwoven within the purchase.

Therefore, branding, if it had successfully cultivated a fake culture that, in some cases, literally had nothing to do with its products, could potentially capture, colonize, and practically enslave the hearts and minds of its consumers. In doing so, the corporation carves a void within its consumers that could only be filled by the corporation itself. Who wants the Blue IBM, "looking as clunky and menacing as the now-dead Cold War," (a feeling created after the Orwellian takeoff ad) when you could be "hip" and "new" and Apple-y. Branding based its success, then, on not making the product seem worthy of your money, but rather, to make an individual feel dissatisfied with what he already possesses. Put another way, fraternities only become attractive not by the sticky floors, caked with clumsy spills of Natty Light Beer, semen, and blood, but rather when one feels like his group of friends does not offer the same "camaraderie" and "brotherhood" that can only be attained through the semesterly-membership fee and centuries-worth safeguarding of white privilege and wealth.

The implications in Klein's discussion are fairly dismal. The boundaries of experience have shrunk from the actual world to the confines and architectures formulaically designed by an unnamed, unidentifiable marketing team. In doing so, corporations have potentially dispossessed human beings of their own culture-producing capabilities. In other words, humans, who have heretofore positioned themselves within particular communities colored by their own histories and interactions with their environments, are finding themselves instead within "cultures" that have been manufactured for them, with histories that are absolutely artificial and de-particularized of actual social and historical episodes that explain their current condition. Meaning-making and lifestyle are no longer found in or built by an engagement with the world, but rather through a stagnant, virtual world. Corporations, according to Klein, have transcended their role as manufacturing products; they manufacture life dehistoricized; they are creators; they have souls; thus, they have pushed any "heretical" non-customers towards the dark tumors of lifelessness, boringness, blandness -- they are brandless.

Mythologies Today?

2010-07-22T13:12:00.001-07:00

The ego is not master in its own house.

2010-07-20T12:56:00.001-07:00

-- Freud

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden

2010-07-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

-- Freud

Precis to Dr. Schreber

2010-07-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

(by Derick Olson)

Mr. Schreber wants to be a woman. Not just any woman, but the “wife of God,” ready to be miraculously impregnated by the “holy rays” of the Creator in order to give birth to the “new race of mankind.” From the initial delusion that his psychiatrist, Dr. Flechsig, would steal his soul and transform his body into a woman's for sexual pleasure, Schreber extends the delusion to a persecution from God and finally, the impregnation from God to save humanity. In “The Phychotic Dr. Schreber,” Sigmund Freud takes on the task of interpreting such delusions.

To start, it is a question of which comes first: the illusion or the fantasy? This chicken or the egg scenario leads to two possibilities: Does Schreber thirst for eternal glory and use his transformation into a woman as a means to such glory? Or does he secretly fantasize about being a woman, and justify the desire with the idea that it is necessary for him to save humanity as a woman?

Freud argues for the latter. He begins with the larger fantasy of saving the world, and dismisses it as a justification for Schreber's desire to be a woman. He then interprets the desire to be a woman as a form of Schreber's repressed homosexuality. This latent homosexuality, Freud says, is present in everyone, but is usually exerted through “brotherly love” and “comradeship.” Dr. Schreber consciously believes that he is interested in women, but his subconscious push for his true homosexual desires cause an internal struggle that, when paired with the stress of overwork, lead to psychotic delusions. He initially justifies his love of men with a desire to become a woman. But such a desire goes “against the order of things,” so he states that his psychiatrist, Dr. Flechsig, and later God Himself, is “persecuting” him in order to make him a woman for a male's sexual gratification (which is all Schreber really wants from mankind). Finally, Dr. Schreber creates a new reality where his delusions can thrive, the post-apocalyptic world in which an impregnation from God is the only way that he (or she) can save humanity.

Freud's interpretation of Dr. Schreber seems generally sound, especially when the added allusions to Schreber's life are taken into account (the links between the love for his lost father relate to his image of God, and his wish to continue his family line despite his lack of children). Yet the conclusions are solely based on the Freudian interpretation of the mind that it all originates with the libido and its consequent sexual urges. This view leaves no room for the inverse interpretation, that perhaps Dr. Schreber's desire was for glory and recognition, and the idea of becoming a woman was just a means to that end.

Let's say that Schreber felt that his life was devoid of meaning; nobody saw his genius as worthy of the glory that he desired. He had come from a prestigious family and was active in German politics, but it was not enough. Perhaps he felt that his superior intellect was worthy of divine recognition, that he should be in direct contact with God. As Schreber fell into delusions of heavenly contact, he needed a way to separate himself from God as not to confuse his well-deserved glory to that of God's. So he took the blow to his masculinity and decided to become the wife of God. Now, in Schreber's false reality anything was possible. If he could become the mother of a new humanity, he would be the savior of all men, and gain the recognition he deserved.

It seems that there could be an infinite number of interpretations of Dr. Schreber's psychosis, and that Freud simply chose one that fit his already-established views of the mind. He takes a fairly narrow angle in his interpretation, dismissing the point that some actions may be based on non-sexual tendencies, drawing lines that favor his theories while ignoring the fact that they could be drawn in infinitely many directions, and justified nonetheless. What Freud claims to be an analysis of the subconscious may be none other than an analysis of coincidence.

While I do admit that Freud's interpretation of the issue is most convincing, his one-sided approach and complete dismissal of the inverse option seems unjustifiable. To reduce the complex nature of the mind to a mere exchange of sexual energy (which I do agree is a large part) is to ignore all other facets of humanity. Although our primordial sexual nature is a dominant trait in our lives, desires of knowledge, power, and meaning seem independent of the libido rather than the outward appearance of our subconscious urge for sex.

Two More Prompts

2010-07-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Prompt Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.” How and why does the figure of Schreber seem to pose such a challenge to Freud’s larger effort to portray the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber’s own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Why might this matter so much to Freud in the first place?

Prompt Four:

How does the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differ in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle? What political significance attaches to these different treatments in their respective texts in your view? Discuss the relation of spectatorship to political agency in either of these pieces and substantiate your view through a close reading of salient moments in the text.

Brandits! - or – A Use of Pejorative Language in Informational Texts as a Means of Persuasive Discourse

2010-07-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

I needs must acknowledge my love of Wikipedia. They may well be tarnished by with a lack of credible accredited accreditors of “truth” but I have found these remarkable things called “footnotes” which show a link to a source for most any claims made in articles. Others attack Wikipedia on it's lack of direction and focus since, after all, the amount of attention given to the “plot” intricacies of Lost is greater than that of public intellectual and activist Naomi Klein. Such attacks are, in essence, the sad sorrowful (and sibilant!) lament of those who worship aura and ritual. Wikipedia is thus made to suffer from their sundry authors and their collective decision that Transformers the Movie is more worthy of their time and research than Barry Goldwater. However my instinct on doing a Google® search was not to click on the official Naomi Klein web page (whose imprimatur cannot be questioned, it's “official”!) but instead to click the return listing Wikipedia's name. Haters gonna hate, but I love me some Wikipedia.

I assure the reader that this is all relevant. My love for Wikipedia is not for any concrete thing. I do not love their corporate board, their foundation, their racks of servers in air conditioned rooms. When I inform you that I love Wikipedia what I am saying is that I love the image of Wikipedia I hold. Wikipedia's brand, if you will. Her Wikipedia page makes no mention of her love or hate of the online encyclopedia but her article in the leftist rag The Guardian makes it abundantly clear how she feels about the process and idea of branding itself. She does not care for it. It's also clear that she wants us to share this view, which brings us to our first irony and paradox. If sharing is caring and Klein wants us to share her view of not caring than what is the result? Wait, that's not it.

The actual paradox we are faced with is how a seemingly informative text can act to persuade. The key distinction between informational and persuasive is the existence of a thesis. From this difference all else flows. Newspaper articles, unless they are editorials, are not meant to persuade but to inform. This is true even in the all but commie trash tabloids that masquerade as newspapers in Europe and Klein is publishing excerpts of her book within that format and those constraints. Nowhere in the selection is the author's point of view expressed in a literal fashion; that the production of goods is superior to the production of brands.

Supposedly this is being made clear to the reader simply through the informational context. Naomi Klein reports the facts on brands vs products and we, the reader, decide. This is clearly not true and can be demonstrated with a simple thought experiment. If it was the information itself doing the convincing than there would exist splits in interpretation based on the readers viewpoint. Simplistically all republican's could read it and see it as supporting their views and all democrat's could do the same for their views. But when a piece has an argumentative tint it is clear to all reader regardless of perspective which way the evidence of information leads (whether they agree with it or not). This discrepancy is the result of confirmation bias in which a recipient of information is drastically more inclined to notice and remember information that agrees with their own views. This is the default state of human dialectic, and so rhetorical methods must be employed to break through it.

Enter the pejorative. Klein's first description of brands is that they are a “seemingly innocuous” idea. Let's see. . . the antonym for innocuous is harmful. So right away we are given that, in Klein's view, brands are not good things. Words do not have to be directly insulting to be a pejorative and most of Klein's pejorative is in tone rather than actual words. For instance when she says “The price difference, apparently, was the cost of the word 'Kraft'” she is belittling the notion of a brand being worth real dollars. Throughout her piece figurative language, such as irony and metaphor (quoting an ad man calling the consumer cockroaches and using the term herself) serves to create a thesis and argue persuasively for it. For instance I have nowhere in the body of this precis made literally known my opinion on those stalinist fishwraps that European's fondly imagine to be newspapers, but it should be abundantly clear to all but the most illiterate what I think of them. Sadly you have all been misinformed, I actually like and admire much of European journalism and the Guardian in particular. Readers, you just got punk'd!

While a firm believer that word count matters less than how much each word counts I am afraid that I might be reaching a point where I've used to much to say too little. So let us end where we began (if one accepts that all of us engaged in this text form a community of dialectic, or commune than it can be said we had a nice little communist revolution!) with my looking up information on Naomi Klein. Well, she's Canadian which might explain her dislike of logos and brands by way of jealousy of our obviously vastly superior culture and marketing power. . . Wait, what's this? Not only is she the grand-daughter of communists and the child of new leftists (read: socialists) she reacted to having an active and public feminist mother by embracing full on consumerism. Hmm. . . Then her mother suffers a stroke. . . Interesting. Wonder what Freud would say? Probably something about libido and homosexual tendencies. And last is. . . kind of horrible really. A crazy person took a gun and started shooting women in an attempt to fight feminism. Out of all this Klein is reborn a feminist and she proceeds to do a Henry V and take an ax to her old vices. Context is everything and Wikipedia provided me with context and so my love for Wikipedia (the brand) is affirmed.

Your humble and obedient servant,

- Birney

Barthes

2010-07-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

I'm assuming everybody is keeping up with the reading via our syllabus, but just in case, here's a reminder that for Wednesday you are to have read Barthes' Mythologies, one of a couple texts in the class you had to purchase or get from a library... Hope everybody is having a good weekend and enjoying the readings for this week.

2010-07-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

They Live! by John Carpenter

What is the message? Educate, agitate, and organize.

To Whom is this message being volleyed? The film is directed to all / anyone who can see & hear, or have the film translated to them, so that the auditory & visual messages are linked with the consumerist culture of corporate capitalism, inner city strife (of blighted locales, mostly), and some semblance of the middle-class notion of these class divisions -- most luminously mobilized on a salient & visceral trajectory when a capitalist / consumerist society is economically downtrodden.

Why this sort of medium for the message? To make an exposition of the matters most relevant to the cumulative resolve therein.

Explication: THEY LIVE WE SLEEP

Some of the strongest support, in my lasting opinion, is the connotative values at work in the otherwise abrasivity of everything from the characters and the actors who portray them to the ways in which they are introduced and react to the revealing of materialized linguistic, behavioral suggestiveness being placed out for mass consumption and the manipulatory, divisive nature of those suggestions as a form of coercive and tactical maneuvering.

The glasses working as a vessel for retinal navigation through a lesser apparent landscape cause them to act in effect as somewhat of a drug, and so states Roddy Piper's character somewhere in the dialogue of the film which evolves as something of a metabolized metaphor.

I found "They" to be the most acrobatic term throughout the film, translating into the real world quite seamlessly and accurate considering the help of few assimilations w/the fantastic or supernatural varieties -- paranoia not being one of them.

"Interference" is used in the film briefly(as an explicit term) and coins the static & interceptive presences created by the dynamics of the two forces who create, observe, and perpetuate the existence of this in its identifiable form -- regardless to any paranoic flecking -- to a finite, regulatory station; similar to the way in which the device of interference may have been established to deceive any resistors from discovering, believing or exposing the intentions of any said perpetrators of deliberate injustices which may involve society in mass.

Prompts (Provided Far From Promptly)

2010-07-16T22:41:00.001-07:00

Prompt One:

How might one make a good case that despite what appears to be a rampant and relentless megalomania in his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is actually rather modest in the claims he makes in his book? Substantiate this claim with quotations from the text. What insights might this "modesty" provide us as we try to determine what Nietzsche’s ambitions are for the interpretive method of “affirmation” he proposes in Ecce Homo.

Prompt Two:

Discuss how [1] Klein's discussion of the Logo, [2] Debord's discussion of the Spectacle, [3] Benjamin's discussion of Aura, [4] Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion of the Culture Industry, or [5] Barthes' discussion of Myth (choose just one of these) is, on the one hand, indebted to Marx's account of the fetishized commodity in your view but also, on the other hand, departs from it in some key way.

Prompt Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.” How and why does the figure of Schreber seem to pose such a challenge to Freud’s larger effort to portray the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber’s own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Why might this matter so much to Freud in the first place?

Prompt Four:

How does the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differ in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle? What political significance attaches to these different treatments in their respective texts in your view? Discuss the relation of spectatorship to political agency in either of these pieces and substantiate your view through a close reading of salient moments in the text.

Things Dale Said

2010-07-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

This project of mine is almost completely for my own amusement it seems, but nevertheless I am somewhat disappointed with myself this week. I must have been tired or just beaten to the ground remembering how very depressing of a spin all of these people and their ideas can take. Neitzsche, although one of my favorite people to read (I, unlike Dale, think his humor is hilarious), is hard to swallow at times, especially reflecting on some of his darker works. Marx I resonate with on a lot of levels except for the fact that everything gets reverted into 'class struggle' which negates a lot of equally if not more important struggles from history. He really burns my muffins, but hey, what can you do? Not many people thought of women as much of anything but the incubator. His contemporaries slowly get better at some of these aspects but being new material for me, and the end of the week, I definitely needed that cup of coffee.

Consequently the quotes I did get verbatim were few and far between, and a lot of them were also dependant on Dale's particular flare (tone, gestures, context, etc.). Last week I had a lot more to pick from so I could post the ones that really made me smile when reading them over. So for those of you who bother to read this, I will make sure to use the break time to "smoke a crack pipe" and try to at least be entertaining. (And remember Dale, mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery). ;)

Last week on Things Dale Said:

[in reference to the title 'Ecce Homo'] " It becomes especially rich, though still not funny."

"Previews of coming attractions, it stays depressing - all the way through."

"'Have I been understood?' Why do you care so much?! If you love something set it FREE!"

"Just keep people talking and they'll die before they commit too many war crimes."

"We must be careful of poets."

[Sorry Joseph, but this was funny]

"That was a joke by the way."

"And like Nietzsche, not funny."

[Resentement] "Oh how terrible. But then there's also this zing!"

"If one's radical politics were committed to material through their argument, then surely it matters far less what that might say on the unsolvable question whether one entity like god would exist or not. Whether or not god exists, or not, there are a lot of existing people that believe he does, or not. And because people believe in an entity they call god, or not, those people behave differently."

"Education. Agitation. Organization."

"A person wearing a wrist watch is a different huma being than a person living in a feudal era that has never heard of wristwatches. We are a different species."

"It's just this ranting and raving and NAZI THIS and NAZI THAT! It's a very unexpected and incendiary argument to read."

[In reference to Marxist idea of 'leisure'] "Haha, yeah I know, really depressing."

"What are you some radical, dark-night individualist or something? Can't have that..."

"Alright, your teacher wants to go home. Disperse! Time for cocktails! Disperse!"

...and like a good student, who am I to question Dale? With advice like that, who is to tell me that's a bad idea?

TA Office Hours

2010-07-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody.

Just a reminder of the announcement I made in yesterday's class. I will be holding office hours to discuss paper ideas and questions about the first essay next Wednesday (6/21) from 1:30pm to 3pm. Look for me in front of the main entrance to Dwinelle, just outside of our classroom window.

I'm also willing to schedule short individual appointments with students to discuss paper topics, or even just to review the texts. In general, I can make time either before or after our Wed/Thurs class meetings. email: jgar@berkeley.edu

Your Laptop Charger

2010-07-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

Yep.. you left it in the classroom and it is safe with me. MHUHUHUHUHAHAHHAHAHAHAAAAaaaaa....

Precis for Benjamin Walter's The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

2010-07-15T15:00:00.001-07:00

In order to answer the questions the perplex me, I must first lay out the problem itself. In his essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin discusses a shift in perception of what constitutes art and its affects due to the advent of film and photography in the twentieth century. According to Walter, the way we look and see the visual work of art has changed dramatically due to the creation of film and cinematography. More specifically, Walter suggests that through the mechanical reproduction of art i.e. through the process of creating a perfect film devoid of any “slippage of tongues” or imperfections; the aura of a piece of art is withered and destroyed. This withering is, in the opinion of Walter, similar to the commoditization of objects which Marx described.

The aura that Walter describes is a piece of art’s sense of meaning, uniqueness and presence. In other words, the aura represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art. As an example, Walter describes how a painting possesses an aura and yet a photograph does not because it is not unique; it is simply a copy of some piece of scenery. To Walter, a painting contains within it the power and soul of the painter who spent a multitude of painstaking hours attempting to replicate something knowing that nothing they could do would ever create an exact copy. Modern technology however, has made the dreams of many painters possible; while in the action of doing so has erased the originality and authenticity of the work of art. It has taken from the art the very thing that made it art and Walter fears the consequences of such actions.

If we lose the aura of the art, we lose the singular authority within the work of art itself. As perplexing and ominous as this thought is, Walter is even more intrigued by the tension between the new modes of perception and the aura. Walter points out that some do not see the effects which mechanical reproduction has had on the world as a negative outcome. It seems to him that the need for mass consumption and production of art has caused many to enjoy the pleasures which mechanical reproduction bring. Some feel that the cameraman, for example, intervenes with what we see in a way which a painting can never do. He directs the eye towards a specific place and a specific story in a manner which is both totalitarian and beautiful.

But Walter is still a skeptic. In his opinion, the “art” of cinematography dulls our perception of art and leaves out the essence of the art itself. When a person watches a live play, they are able to see the characters from a multitude of views rather than the narrow chosen out view that the cameraman chooses for us. In this sense, movies have no aura for Walter because while they are sometimes original, they do not leave things open for interpretation. When someone copied a painting, only a few could find the aura of it. Those few were skilled individuals who knew enough of the artist to see the subtle changes in the copier’s stroke or distribution of the characters. This lack of participation is worrisome for Walter.

Similarly, Walter feels one cannot truly participate in a movie other than to simply observe it. The movie is being played out before us like a story, yet the orator is a set of lines on a screen devoid of any emotion and the actions which occur on the screen are ever the same and do not possess the beauty of subtle changes and mistakes. The movie consumes us at the same time as we consume it. This, Walter suggests, is not necessarily a negative thing, but rather something to be noted and watched; its implications, whether detrimental or beneficial, yet to be determined. The loss of the aura has the potential to open up the politicization of art and though that opening our culture stands to be changed from one of the inspector to one of the inspected – that is to say that through our loss of the aura of art we stand the chance to lose our ability to inspect art and in turn allow the art to inspect us. We have in a sense begun a process of commoditization of art in which the art loses its aura (its essence of originality) through the mass reproduction and mechanical production of it.

While I do very much agree with Walter in his belief that the induction of mechanical reproduction of art and products has had a dramatic impact on the art itself, I do not believe that the aura which he describes is necessarily lost. Art is unique because of the vision and heart that is put into it; not how it was made. So in this sense, a picture can have just as much aura as a painting; the only difference in the form in which the artist choose to express themselves. A picture can be unique in many ways; for instance: the cameraman’s choice of lighting, angle, positioning of the object(s), and even the camera itself can all have a dramatic effect on the overall look and feel of the picture. Thus to say that photography has no aura in simply incorrect and short sighted (I realize he probably wasn’t a master on photography, however to say that photography isn’t art is like saying Picasso wasn’t an artist because he didn’t use enough red in his paintings – that is to say that art is a very subjective thing and the biggest flaw in Walter’s essay is that he assumes a limited point of view on art which doesn’t adequately speak to the idea of new forms of art).

This brings me to question Walter’s belief that we have commoditized art; if, as I previously stated, art has not lost its aura due to the mechanical reproduction of art, then it stands to reason that Walter’s argument is seriously flawed. With that ultimatum out of the way, I would like to say that I do not disagree with Walter completely. It is true that we have begun to commodify art and movies in general; however, they have not lost their artistic roots. No two movies are the same. Many of you may instantly say well what about remakes or renditions of movies? Aren’t they the same? To that I would answer with an assured no. A rendition of a movie will generally have different actors and different scenes and in that simplest sense they are different and unique. Just the fact that they differ even in the slightest from the original makes them unique and gives them their own aura. If a copy of a painting can have an aura then so can a copy of a movie. While there are undoubtedly some really bad and meaningless movies out there, they still have aura.

To sum up, I found this essay to very interesting especially when viewed from a futuristic perspective. Having grown up in a time of movies and cameras, the theories Walter presents seem strange and laudable, however I can only imagine what it must have been like to see such a dramatic change happen within your lifetime. Walter is slightly more justified in his argument by the fact that he is writing from the view of what seems to be a Marxist point of view to others who share his sentiments and beliefs. After having written my overly critical assessment of his argument, I realized that my reasons for criticizing him lie in the fact that I am from a different time period – a time period which has seen a strange myriad of art forms emerge and become accepted. I welcome any questions (I am sure I was incorrect on many accounts) and would like to hear what others thought of Walter and his essay.

-Skyler

Globalization and Commodity Fetishism

2010-07-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

Based on the readings and lecture yesterday, 0ne might argue that globalization is the final development of commodity fetishism and capitalism. Like Marx's definition of commodity, globalization is "neutral" in that the only desired relationship is the development of consumer markets and producers who make products which they themselves may not consume, but are paid as little as possible.

Althusser

2010-07-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

I've added a text to the syllabus for our meeting on July 29. Preparing for the discussion of Foucault and Arendt I find I am turning to the ISAs essay so much -- and preparing to put so many quotes from the piece onto the blog as supplements for that day -- that I figure you might as well just go ahead and read it anyway. That makes for a pretty daunting day of reading, but everybody should read that piece after all, anyway. So, be sure to update your hardcopy syllabi -- the essay is available online and there is a link to it on the online syllabus, so it isn't difficult to access to anything. See you all later this afternoon.

Office Hours

2010-07-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

I will be available for conversation at least an hour (I'm shooting for an hour and a half) prior to the beginning of class this afternoon -- and Thursdays more generally. If the weather is fine, I am more likely to be sitting on the stone benches in the Dwinelle Courtyard next to our classroom than in that hot barren stuffy dusty office of mine, so look for me there outside first.

Georg Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness

2010-07-14T06:33:00.001-07:00

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure…. The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

Marx: "There Is No Royal Road to Science"

2010-07-14T06:23:00.001-07:00

1872 PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION of Capital:

To the citizen Maurice Lachâtre

Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me, dear citizen, Your devoted,

Karl Marx
London
March 18, 1872

Marx As the "Darwin" of History

2010-07-14T06:22:00.001-07:00

In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:

[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.

Theses On Feuerbach

2010-07-14T06:20:00.001-07:00

1

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [Objekte], differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity. In The Essence of Christianity [Das Wesen des Christenthums], he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [Erscheinungsform][1]. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

2

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

3

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

4

Feuerbach starts off from the fact of religious self-estrangement [Selbstentfremdung], of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [weltliche] one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated [vernichtet] theoretically and practically.

5

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants sensuous contemplation [Anschauung]; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

6

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated - human individual.

2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.

7

Feuerbach consequently does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form.

8

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

9

The highest point reached by contemplative [anschauende] materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society [bürgerlichen Gesellschaft].

10

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.

11

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

"I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar."

2010-07-13T13:01:00.001-07:00

-- Nietzsche

Nietzsche: The Gay Science

2010-07-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you--all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly." If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Nietzsche: On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense

2010-07-13T12:50:00.001-07:00

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...

Nietzsche: HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. The History of an Error

2010-07-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )

3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

Anybody Bought the Reader Yet?

2010-07-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

How much did it cost? How's it look? Any problems?

Précis for Ecce Homo

2010-07-13T00:31:00.000-07:00

The object of Nietzsche's argument in Ecce Homo is not Christian morality, but rather mythology in general. The argument is for the recognition of myths for what they are—ideals, things man-made—and no more; the attack on Christian morality, is incidental—it just happens to be a dominant myth in contemporary society (according to Nietzsche). The danger in mistaking an ideal for reality is the unwitting cultivation of sickness rather than of health. His task is not towards an improvement of mankind: it is against false improvements.

Ecce Homo seeks to overthrow idols—his word, he tells us, for “ideals.” Here is the text's first explicit “revaluation of values”: one word is identified with another in order to undermine the normative distinction between them. An ideal, for Nietzsche, is not just an idea, but an idea which is worshiped; it is made here to share “idol's” connotations of excess and falsity. These words have never, in fact, been too semantically disparate; nonetheless, “ideal” tends to provoke more positive than negative connotations. It is this normative lie, the “mendaciously invented world,” representing a real sickness bedizened with the language of Christian morality, which Ecce Homo seeks to strip.

In “Why I Am So Wise” Nietzsche revaluates decadence by applying the term to his historical self, first describing his own decadence and then enumerating in the same figure qualities fundamentally opposite decadence (the activity with which he took his physical health in hand (is this a paradox?), his abandonment of pessimism at his point of “lowest vitality,” his careful consideration of “what is good for him” (in particular), etc.). This is a crucial revaluation, decadence later serving as a heading under which Christian morality is placed. (There is an intimacy between decadence and ressentiment—the latter of which Nietzsche asserts sickness as a kind—which demands further discussion. It is also primarily within the space of the historical Nietzsche's sickness that his own decadence is discussed. The definition of morality in “Why I Am Destiny” posits it as “the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully.” This motive seems irrefragably rooted in ressentiment).

It is hardly worth saying, Nietzsche's audience is a rare or nonexistent one. This he readily admits: to understand anything at all of his text “one must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am—with one foot beyond life.” Got it?

One cannot, according to Nietzsche, “become what one is” while living within the lexicon of morality, for this would be to become what one isn't—namely, an ideal. Nietzsche's argument is literal, and the gridiron beneath the ideal—the ideal including the moral—is the literal. It is not that all ideals are bad (note the slip back into morality) but rather that many common normative ideals are productive of sickness rather than of health. What one is is a (wo)man, flourishing, becoming—not ill, dying.

What comes to replace “good” and “evil?” If we must have an answer we might say: whatever is productive of healthiness and of unhealthiness, respectively. The text's predominating alimentary concerns are not troping, but literal.

(By Ryan Nichols)

Nietzsche’s Atypical View of Truth and Morality

2010-07-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

by Lena Vuong

Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo primarily concerns itself with humanity’s attention to truth and morality. However, this essay is a far cry from conventional ideas of reality and virtue. Instead of succumbing to Christian morality as the proper model for ideals, Nietzsche radically assumes a position diametrically opposed to it, supporting what society may call its vices, instead of its virtues, and more practical, bodily concerns, rather than the questions of God or the soul, as the singular guides to the truth. Of the real world, Nietzsche asserts that humanity has “mendaciously invented” it and that beyond just erecting this false pillar, on top of which sits Christian morality, we mistakenly and wholeheartedly accept its validity, plunging ourselves into a mire untruths from which only Nietzsche has been able to escape, according to him. To be a human, then, is to be more than Christ was. The naming of the text, Ecce Homo, which translates to Behold the Man, is a contrast of Nietzsche, who was a real man, to Christ, who was not.

Assuming the role as a moral decadent, Nietzsche wades through the virtues honored by humanity and proceeds in refuting each one with the assertion that their opposites are those that should be valued. Of “unselfish tendencies” and “neighborly love,” he desecrates the associated selfless intentions and accuses it of weakness and impertinence. Instead, rude words should be appreciated because those who speak them have courage enough to contradict. Sympathy should not be admired but despised by those who receive it from others because it falls under the category of “neighborly love” and so should be refused. In addition, the ability to be an enemy “presupposes a strong nature” because it is an indicator that the person has the strength to resist. Above all, that dubbed the “highest wisdom” is fatalism: not desiring to be different from one’s self; to view ourselves as “a destiny.” In these lies the crust of Nietzsche’s main argument of “how one becomes what one is”. Presumably, what one is, is a man. To realize this requires moving beyond the false view of humanity that Christian morality has imposed on us.

The answers to his self-laudatory titles, Why Am I So Wise and Why Am I So Clever, are in his inversions of conventional values. Nietzsche is wise because he has been enlightened so as to understand that all accepted values need revaluation, and he is clever because he, different from all else, has been able to ascend beyond the lies humanity imposed upon itself to realize the truth that had been masked behind the label of immorality, branded by Christian morality. To Nietzsche, God “is such an obvious and crass solution.” It is behind this shroud that truth lies. Because of this false ideal brought on by Christianity, humanity has come to value all that is untrue and to believe themselves to be capable of being different or better, when what one should focus on are the more practical: diet, locality, climate, recreation, and egoism. In describing their importance, Nietzsche does not directly compare them to the mendacious ideals of God, the soul, sin, or ‘eternal life.’ The only difference between them is that one is actually realistic and so our center of attention must be on them, while the other is an empty promise that will lead humanity nowhere, as said by Zarathustra when he declares that “you had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me,” indicating humanity’s misleading of themselves to reach for something unnecessary. In his rejection of Christian values and defense of what most would call immoral, Nietzsche reaches morality.

An interesting point of discussion stems from the possible reasons Nietzsche had for writing this essay at all. How one becomes what one is, according to him, “presupposes that one has not the remotest suspicion of what one is.” Therefore, “a unique meaning and value is given to even the blunders of one’s life… the earnestness wasted upon tasks remote from the central one.” Wisdom can come from these mistakes. If so, even without reading Nietzsche’s essay, would not one still become what one is? If the right ideas will grow within us, leading “us slowly back from your deviations and aberrations,” but at the same time, we must beware of anything that leads “to the dangerous possibility that the instinct may ‘understand itself’ too soon,” why should this essay be written or read at all? It seems that realizing the falsities of our morals may fall under the ‘dangerous’ time-range suggested by Nietzsche himself.

Clearly, though, the mastery of distinguishing the true truths and the false truths will require the whole of humanity’s attention to everything we previously thought was undoubted.

Things Dale Said

2010-07-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sure even the most educated/adept/intellectual/mature of us leave the class after the 2.5 hours slightly foggy headed with the thousands of words seen, heard and thought about. I believe that most people could read the texts and listen to the lectures over and over again and come to different conclusions, or at least be a little less sure about their first conclusion as to what it all means. As we learned today, rhetoric's a bitch.

So, in the spirit of Dale (and I do believe it is in his spirit with all the quotes he spits out from various personalities of the last few millennia), I will provide this blog with various quotes from the last week.

On a personal note: I have to say, I find numerous things that Dale says to be equally hilarious and thought provoking. That being said, most of my notes are just quotes by him that I think it's nice to share with everyone so we can all reminisce and try and swim through his word vomit. Some might make you giggle, some might seem irrelevant, and some might just remind you of that one thing you asked him to repeat and he said that he couldn't tell you what it was. Either way, it's nice to revisit some of these moments.

On the last episode of Things Dale Said:

“This is an impossible class, literally”

“Go to Amazon and be evil”

"Oh you Berkeley students..."

The first definition will tell you, in even the most generic dictionary, 'the art of persuasive speech,' the second; ‘something like bullshit’

"the business of language is to find the salient similarities and the salient differences with sense and clarity, so that it makes sense to one another”

“Write something substantial but don’t bore me”

“the work of critical theory is the work of finding ourselves in the habitation of the text”

"Oscar Wilde’s favorite obsession and most conspicuous symptom = an endless recourse to the figure of paradox"

“Oscar Wile was the first gay man because he invented it”

Precis of Wilde's Socialism

2010-07-08T17:46:00.000-07:00

Oscar Wilde’s Attempt to Protect Individual Expression
By Eddie Burns

What begins as a seemingly valiant effort to combat poverty in Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism becomes a plea for Laissez-faire of artistic expression, figuratively named Individualism. His argument for individualism (spelled capitalized) is evident throughout the text but is hidden under the title and initial argument of the essay. However, by the conclusion of the text, Wilde clearly demonstrates his desire that artistic expression be excluded from governance for the betterment of the masses.
The basic idea of Wilde’s argument for Individualism is expressed through a comparison of the oppression of art to the oppression of people. He begins by showing that people advocate for social change from what appears to be a capitalistic society to a socialist one to help the poor. He does this by providing evidence that figures the poor for slaves and gives examples as to how this is accomplished in the economic system. He also appeals to the reader as an advocate for change, empowering his audience with perspective and perhaps eliciting a guilty conscience. Wilde calls assumptions into question in his argument and even uses concessions to preempt rebuttal from those who would support the current economic system (or as the evidence shows, attack the ideas that socialist views drift into an authoritarian ideology). But the focus of his argument, while in appearance is social/economic change, is always the push for individualism
It is very interesting that Wilde first begins his argument with an apparent concession – that there are exceptional people who are able to live for themselves, such as Flaubert, Darwin, Keats and Renan – because it accomplishes several feats. By beginning his argument in this way, Wilde’s essay seems to suggest that his audience is someone who would be against his argument. By conceding the success of these famous people, Wilde attempts to show his understanding of the opposition’s viewpoint that change is not necessary. Second, it introduces artists (even artists of science) who Wilde believes kept out of public scrutiny which allowed them to “…realize the perfection of what was in him” (1). Third, this list of successful people allows the argument to bridge from economic success to individualism, a point made later in the essay.
In order to build pathos for his argument, Wilde cleverly (and even logically) equates the oppression of poverty to slavery. The essay notes that the altruistic have tried to solve the problem of poverty by being kind and then quickly discredits this rationale. Wilde says that it was because of the kindness of some slave holders that prevent the horrific reality of slavery to come to light (1). In stating this, the text accomplishes several things. It introduces the idea of slavery into the argument and draws an emotional response from the oppression of slavery and maps it onto the oppression of poverty. The essay now has the reader recall the idea of slavery every time they are told about oppression, figuratively mapping an emotional response that seemingly would not have been there in the first place. Under the disguise of this first line of argument, the idea of oppressed people will shift from the poor to those who are not allowed to be individuals, namely artists.
There is a long extended metaphor of slave to poverty to artist that will continue through the essay and is crucial Wilde’s argument. Wilde shows that those who do not own private property are bitterly oppressed poverty stricken people. He states, “there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden…” (2) using words associated with slavery for added force. Injecting phrases like “beasts of burden” and “starvation,” Wilde’s argument feeds off of the pathos generated through the link to slavery to enhance the idea that the oppressed cannot help themselves and must rely on outside forces for their liberation.
As a means of social change, Wilde suggests that rebellion is necessary. He tries to alter the norms of conduct, saying that it is foolish for people to continue to acquiesce to a system that is the cause of their ruin. He then shows that it is necessary to disobey in order for change to occur. In a call to rebellion, Wilde states, “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue” (3). He mentions this statement, which the Royal Society would use as a basis for human advancement though science and experiment, to posit the story of Adam and Eve and equates Eve’s disobedience of eating the apple to liberation. Wilde justifies rebellion against the system of oppression as a means of liberty and advancement of mankind.
The strongest evidence to support who is Wilde’s audience is evidenced through the extended slavery/poverty/oppressed artist metaphor. Having shown the poor to be oppressed people who are no better off than slaves, Wilde calls upon those who are free from the burdens of poverty to set the social revolution into motion, showing that it was the illegal acts of the Abolitionists who were the instruments of change that ended slavery (5). The oppressed people would be less likely to read an essay than someone who is not under such constraints. Wilde demonstrates that the oppressed people are not able to help themselves and that it is the oppressed who are dependent on the conscience of others – such as the reader – to liberate them.
Wilde’s concession that some socialists sound like they have adopted an Authoritarian tone reveals an awareness of the audience, placing Wilde in a position of empathy with his readers, and introduces the shift from economic tyranny to the oppression of freedom and expression. Wilde says, “… that no Authoritarian Socialism will do” (5), seemingly anticipating his audience’s rebuttal for a reform to Socialism and distancing himself from it. He continues, saying, “… I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority…” (5). This concession seems to anticipate the reader’s objection to socialism, but it also uses emotionally charged words like “Authoritarian” and “tyranny,” placing these words in opposition to “freedom and expression and happiness” (4). These emotionally charged words help the essay create pathos onto anything that can be seen as authoritarian and in contradiction to freedom, expression, and happiness. This shift from economic oppression to the oppression of the spirit is the start of a more clear focus of the text on the preservation, sanctification, and justification of Individualism.
It is interesting the Wilde uses a metaphor of individualism to financial independence but it seems to fit with his logos of the poor losing their identity to the oppression of the economic system. To Wilde, the poor are nothing more than the vehicle that delivers the rich their wealth. They do not have private property, and therefore must live in service to those who do. The idea that every man was his own head versus the old idea that every man was one part of the body politic lead the British people to accept the idea of individualism. But Wilde insists that the oppressed have lost that individualism to the system that will not allow them private property. It seems that he wants to allow people to regain that individualism in a way that circumvents the ownership of private property. An even broader argument, however, is that he wants the people to be allowed to express their individualism in public.
It seems that the main goal of Wilde’s essay is that people are allowed to live and that the economic governance, possession of private property, and the accumulation of wealth will thwart this end. Yet the economic system is just one way of governance of which Wilde rejects. To Wilde, being an individual is the movement away from existence and into life (6). Taking the contrapositive, Wilde’s argument says that not being an individual is not living, and therefore it is necessary to life to be an individual. This, to Wilde, is not possible “… in the present condition of things” (1). The metaphor of private property (or economic independence) to individual freedom is extended to being alive, suggesting that if one does not need to worry about their economic status then they do not have to fear oppression of their individual freedom. By expressing oppression from slavery, mapping it onto the oppression of individual freedom, and further mapping this onto a life that is more than mere existence, Wilde attempts to garner sympathy and change the convictions of his audience.
He then moves into what he calls, “the perfect personality” which is a person who is at peace. This peace has not yet been achieved, seemingly because the individual suffers under the burdens that strip individualism. He anticipates that people will be at peace because they won’t succumb to vice and discord created by the necessity of accumulating wealth (6). This seems to be a pipe dream and it seems to be a stretch for Wilde to imagine that there is such a thing as a “true personality” which mankind has yet to discover and that humans have failed to live as Wilde suggests.
The religious aspect of the essay seems to add another layer onto his argument by asking the reader to equate the oppressed with a fully developed personality and the rich to those who are not ready to receive Christ. This line of argument suggests to the rich that they are inferior in the eyes of Christ. His argument gains more credibility is in the recount of the woman who perfumes Jesus’ hair. He relates that the woman is spiritually rich, willing to give her money in pursuit of spiritual gains (8). Certainly, the audience, wealthy as they may be, would be aware of this biblical lesson. Wilde attempts to build up a guilty conscience in his reader in order to persuade the audience into his justification for Individualism by equating the oppression of the poor to the oppression of Individualism.
Wilde’s use of the perfume parable allows him to completely switch from a denunciation of economic oppression to an argument in support of personal expression. He says that Jesus, “… pointed out … that the spiritual needs of man were [great], and that in one divine moment … by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make itself perfect” (8). Wilde contends that personal expression was the means that the woman makes her personality perfect and even expresses the idea that the world sanctifies this expression of personality. It seems fitting that an artist such as Wilde will make this assertion because it serves to protect his interest in the freedom of personal expression.
Moving through his desire for laisse-faire governance of Individualism, Wilde attacks authority and the idea of government. He does this by equating the idea of government to the idea of “the public” and then discredits the public. In a tongue-in-cheek attack, Wilde says that “All modes of government are failures,” where “High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people” (9). If the government is just an extension of the people, then it is the people who oppress the individual. Wilde is shows that all modes are a failure, suggesting even religious governance as a mode that fails the individual.
Wilde defines Individualism through figurative language by stating that art is an expression of Individualism which must be defended. Wilde states that “art is the most intense mode of Individualism…” and essentially figures the idea of art to an individual. Coupled with Wilde’s idea that to be an Individual is to be alive (and conversely to die is to conform), Wilde claims that Art is a mode of life that expresses itself without conforming and must be allowed to exist without the governance that will oppress it into conformation.
Wilde illustrates his ideas for how art has escaped the oppression of governance by the people’s lack of interest in poetry and how poetry has thus been allowed to grow. He shows that the people, a word that Wilde figures for governance, generally do not take an interest in poetry and it is because of this that it has been allowed to grow. He says, “We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it” (12). Clearly, Wilde believes that for the art of poetry to be “fine” it must not be influenced by people other than the artist. The text seems extremely preoccupied with this idea when one notes the length of the paragraph dedicated to this discussion.
In a strong defense of art, Wilde shows that art is necessary to humans because it is an expression of the Individual and not controlled by the masses. Wilde says about art that “… it seeks to disturb … monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine,” and “Art is Individualism and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force” (13). Wilde feels that it is because art is the result of individualism that it allows people to differentiate themselves and avoid monotony. It is the creation art that separates humans from machines.
Wilde argues against the prohibitions of Individualism, chiefly the mode of individual expression that is art. He uses metaphors which, though may change, flow logically through figurative language. He uses words such as slavery and oppression to figure for the oppression individual expression and freedom. He uses concessions to identify with his audience but turns the concessions into points of contention in order to convince his audience that it is right to allow Individualism. Throughout the essay, the audience seems to be a person who must be persuaded, suggesting that the audience is an authority figure (religious or political) who either contributes to the oppression of Individualism or is someone who does not but may be persuaded to take up the cause of liberating Individualism.

Wilde: Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)

2010-07-08T13:24:00.001-07:00

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

A really well-maded buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Time is a waste of money.

One should always be a little improbable.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

To be premature is to be perfect.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Wilde: Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

2010-07-08T13:23:00.001-07:00

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Our Syllabus

2010-07-06T09:51:00.001-07:00

Who Holds the Keys?
Rhet 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
Summer 2010

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Blog: http://rhettwenty.blogspot.com
7/6-8/13 T-W-R 3-5.30 160 Dwinelle

Att/Part, 14%; Precis, 14%; Mid-Term, 36%; Final, 36%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One
July 6 -- Administrative Introduction
July 7 -- Introductions
July 8 -- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Week Two
July 13 -- Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)
July 14 -- Marx, from The German Ideology, Idealism and Materialism
Marx on Commodity Fetishism from Capital
July 15 -- Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry

Week Three
July 20 -- Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" [reader]
July 21 -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies [Purchase Book]
Kobena Mercer, On Mapplethorpe [reader]
July 22 -- Naomi Klein, No Logo One
Two
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Week Four
July 27 -- Carpenter (dir.), They Live In-Class Screening -- First Essay Due (4-5pp.)
July 28 -- William Burroughs, "Coincidence" and "Immortality" [reader] Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
July 29 -- Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? [reader], Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future [reader], and Louis Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.

Week Five
Aug 3 -- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Purchase Book], Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [reader]
Aug 4 -- Paul Gilroy, from Postcolonial Melancholia [reader]
Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity" [reader]
Aug 5 -- Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space
CS Lewis Abolition of Man

Week Six
Aug 10 -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Aug 11 -- Bruno Latour, A Plea for Earthly Science
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Aug 12 -- Conclusions -- Second Essay Due (5-6pp.)

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing

2009-07-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

In this course you will be producing argumentative writing based on close textual readings. As a first approximation of what I mean I offer you these four general guidelines I will want you to apply to your writing this term. If you can incorporate these four writing practices into your future work you will have mastered the task of producing a competent argumentative paper for just about any discipline that would ask you for one.

A First Habit

An argumentative paper will have a thesis. A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show. Very often, the claim will be straightforward enough to express in a single sentence or so, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of the paper. A thesis is a claim that is strong. A strong claim is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you feel a need to argue for. Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the wider work the text is accomplishing. Once you have determined the dimension or element in a text that you want to argue about, your opposition might consist of those who would focus elsewhere or who would draw different conclusions from your own focus. Your thesis is your paper's spine, your paper's task. As you write your papers, it is a good idea to ask yourself the question, from time to time, Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph support my thesis in some way? If it doesn’t, delete it. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.

A Second Habit

You should define your central terms, especially the ones you may be using in an idiosyncratic way. Your definitions can be casual ones, they don’t have to sound like dictionary definitions. But it is crucial that once you have defined a term you will stick to the meaning you have assigned it yourself. Never simply assume that your readers know what you mean or what you are talking about. Never hesitate to explain yourself for fear of belaboring the obvious. Clarity never appears unintelligent.

A Third Habit

You should support your claims about the text with actual quotations from the text itself. In this course you will always be analyzing texts (broadly defined) and whatever text you are working on should probably be a major presence on nearly every page of your papers. A page without quotations is often a page that has lost track of its point, or one that is stuck in abstract generalizations. This doesn't mean that your paper should consist of mostly huge block quotes. On the contrary, a block quote is usually a quote that needs to be broken up and read more closely and carefully. If you see fit to include a lengthy quotation filled with provocative details, I will expect you to contextualize and discuss all of those details. If you are unprepared to do this, or fear that doing so will introduce digressions from your argument, this signals that you should be more selective about the quotations to which you are calling attention.

A Fourth Habit

You should anticipate objections to your thesis. In some ways this is the most difficult habit to master. Remember that even the most solid case for a viewpoint is vulnerable to dismissal by the suggestion of an apparently powerful counterexample. That is why you should anticipate problems, criticisms, counterexamples, and deal with them before they arise, and deal with them on your own terms. If you cannot imagine a sensible and relevant objection to your line of argument it means either that you are not looking hard enough or that your claim is not strong enough.

Co-facilitating Discussions and Writing a Precis

2009-07-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

One of the key assignments for our course is to generate a précis for one of the texts assigned over term. You should post this precis to the class blog -- ideally, but not necessarily before we discuss the text in class. Be sign it with your name if you post pseudonymously, to ensure you get credit for it.

One way to think of a precis is as a basic paraphrase of the argumentative content of a text. Here is a broad and informal guide for a precis, consisting of questions you should always ask of a text as you are reading it, and again after you have finished reading it. Don't treat this as an ironclad template, but as a rough approach to producing a precis -- knowing that a truly fine and useful précis need not necessarily satisfy all of these interventions.

Although you are only responsible for one precis over the course of the term, you can post as many as you like, and I think it is a fine idea to interrogate every assigned text -- at least in a quick informal sort of way -- according to the following guidelines.

A precis should try to answer fairly basic questions such as:

1. What, in your own words, is the basic gist of the argument?

2. To what audience is it pitched primarily? (Do you see yourself as part of that intended audience, and how does your answer impact your reading of the argument?) Does it anticipate and respond to possible objections?

3. What do you think are the argument's stakes in general? To what end is the argument made?

a. To call assumptions into question?
b. To change convictions?
c. To alter conduct?
d. To find acceptable compromises between contending positions?

4. Does it have an explicit thesis? If not, could you provide one in your own words for it?

5. What are the reasons and evidence offered up in the argument to support what you take to be its primary end? What crucial or questionable warrants (unstated assumptions the argument takes to be shared by its audience, often general attitudes of a political, moral, social, cultural nature) does the argument seem to depend on? Are any of these reasons, evidences, or warrants questionable in your view? Do they support one another or introduce tensions under closer scrutiny?

6. What, if any, kind of argumentative work is being done by metaphors and other figurative language in the piece? Do the metaphors collaborate to paint a consistent picture, or do they clash with one another? What impact does this have on their argumentative force?

7. Are there key terms in the piece that seem to have idiosyncratic definitions, or whose usages seem to change over the course of the argument?

As you see, a piece that interrogates a text from these angles of view will yield something between a general book report and a close reading, but one that focuses on the argumentative force of a text. For the purposes of our class, such a precis succeeds if it manages

(1) to convey the basic flavor of the argument and
(2) provides a good point of departure for a class discussion.

Syllabus

2009-07-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

[NOTE THAT THIS IS THE SYLLABUS FOR THE VERSION OF RHETORIC TWENTY WHICH I TAUGHT IN SUMMER 2009, AND IT IS DIFFERENT IN CERTAIN KEY RESPECTS FROM THE SYLLABUS FOR THE 2010 SUMMER COURSE -- DO NOT CONFUSE THIS ARCHIVAL SYLLABUS WITH THE CURRENT ONE -- d]

Rhet 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
Summer 2009

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Blog: http://rhettwenty.blogspot.com
7/7-8/13 T-W-R 3-5.30 130 Wheeler

Att/Part, 14%; Precis, 14%; Mid-Term, 36%; Final, 36%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One
July 7 -- Administrative Introduction
July 8 -- Introductions
July 9 -- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Week Two
July 14 -- Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)
June 15 -- Marx, from The German Ideology, Idealism and Materialism
Marx on Commodity Fetishism from Capital
June 16 -- Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" [reader]

Week Three
July 21 -- Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
July 22 -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies [Purchase Book]
Kobena Mercer, On Mapplethorpe [reader]
July 23 -- Naomi Klein, No Logo One
Two
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Week Four
July 28 -- Carpenter (dir.), They Live In-Class Screening -- First Essay Due (4-5pp.)
July 29 -- Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? [reader] James Boyle, from Software, Shamans, and Spleens [reader]
Jacques Derrida, Ends of Man [reader]
July 30 -- William Burroughs, "Immortality" [reader] Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Week Five
Aug 4 -- Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space
CS Lewis Abolition of Man
Aug 5 -- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Purchase Book]
Aug 6 -- Paul Gilroy, from Postcolonial Melancholia [reader]
Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity" [reader]

Week Six
Aug 11 -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Aug 12 -- Bruno Latour, A Plea for Earthly Science
Aug 13 -- Conclusions -- Second Essay Due (5-6pp.)