Defining “life”

While reviewing and working on the definition of terms, I had a hard time defining “life”. My first reaction when I saw this term on the list was: how is it possible to define life in terms of theory? Did we talk about life in any of the articles? Life is everything, how can reduce it to one definition? Then I realized, it is everything, it is everything we’ve read and talked about during three months. Primarily, we think of life as a material and physical existence, but on the other hand, this existence is at the same time informed and modified by our ideological beliefs. According to Marx, the material life of an individual as well as that of a society determines his or its ideological beliefs; however Althusser asserts that one’s ideology calls for material practices and rituals, so our life is also marked by the practices and we are constantly been interpellated by our ideological beliefs. Freud interprets the dreams and unveils the concept of unconscious, thus expanding our understanding of the waking life and pointing us to the repressed desires and feelings. For Lacan, one’s life (or identification) is shaped by the Symbolic order and mediated by the Imaginary. Blending Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Zizek argues that our conception of the reality is structured by an unconscious fantasy or illusion, so the life as we know it is always been informed by an ideological illusion. This argument is supported by Foucault’s analysis of the discourse of sexuality and how a seemingly liberation of discourse is merely the result of the change of power, that the discourse of sexuality (and by extension other aspects of life) is still and always been structured by the invisible hands of institutions of power (material and ideological).

Besides these discussions about how life can be generally perceived in different ways, various studies examine a specific aspect in life: feminism and gender studies investigate the very essence of woman and gender, by questioning if it is by mere social construction that we have come to identify ourselves in life; colonial studies shed light on the various realities in the lives of different situations, the encounter of indigenous populations and colonizers and how their lives, including language and literature, are shaped by this experience; the cultural studies revealed the routine forms in the culture industry and the mass reproduction, but it also talked about the “tactics” an individual has at his disposal in everyday life.

Last but not least, as language and literature students, we are also concerned about the representation of life in literature (as well as cinema). But since the beginning of the term, Formalists and structuralists have denied this function of literature as a device of ideology and have drawn our attention to the linguistic and structural studies of a text.

Anyway, this is the final week of the class, aside from these final reviews, I’m so happy that we survived the course!!

Best of luck on our test and maybe it’s too early, Happy holidays everyone!

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin

In his essay, Walter Benjamin raised an interesting question: what happens to a work of art, or art in general, when it can be reproduced into numerous copies in our technical age? What changes could the technical reproduction bring to the work of art?
To begin with, there is the problem of the original. Once we were able to reproduce a work of art, the once unique and original copy loses its authenticity, as well as its authority. The reproductions hence detach from the tradition and lose the “aura” of the work of art. Of course when he wrote about art in his essay in 1935 Benjamin was thinking about art in a traditional sense, mostly painting. And the art in its tradition is essentially characterized by a ritualistic experience, which is shattered by the mechanic reproduction of art. The reproduction of art can therefore meet the “beholder” halfway, and this has profoundly reshaped the relationship between the work of art and its viewer (or listener). As a result of this change, the nature of art has suffered a transformation as well: it is from then on designed to be reproduced and it is measured by its exhibition values. The reaction of the masses toward art have also changed as a result: from the “reactional attitude” to a “progressive reaction”, a “direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert”(1237). This analysis of the relation between the masses and the culture could be considered the predecessor of Horkheimer and Adorno’s examination of mass culture.
According to Benjamin, film is the form par excellence representing this renewal of art and our attitude towards it. Its ability to reach the public and produce mass audience response, is something a painting fails to do. The film provides a collective experience that happens almost simultaneously and without the hierarchical mediation. And another profound change brought by film, is its representation of the environment surrounding men: “by close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera”(1238), the film extends our comprehension of the environment and introduces us to formerly hidden and unconscious optics in our lives.
This aesthetization of the environment, in Benjamin’s opinion, later extended to the aesthetics of the destructive power of the war and to the self-alienation of humankind.

Redefining colonialism, imperialism and post-colonialism

It is interesting to see in this week’s reading both Ania Loomba and Anne McOintock devoted to rethinking and reconsidering the basic terms of colonial studies, by challenging the conventional definitions and clarifying the complexity within the terms.

Ania Loomba started by a reiteration of the term “colonialism”, emphasizing on the historic spread of colonialism and the distinction between pre-capitalist colonialism and capitalist colonialism. She draws on the theory of Marxism to explain the unprecedented global power and effects of modern European colonialism: the capitalist colonialism, by restructuring the economy of their colonies, developed a more interactive and a more deeply penetrating relationship with the colonized countries in order to gain the profits to sustain the growth of European capitalism and industry.

Imperialism, as Loomba continues, is considered as the advanced stage of the development of colonialism: the superabundance of accumulated capital in European colonizers is been moved to the non-industrialized countries and used to sustain the growth of these countries. This global system ensures economic dependency and control even without direct colonial rule.

The post-colonialism, according to Loomba, can’t be properly defined if we don’t take into account the diverse situations and conditions concerning each individual colony as well as the differences or hierarchy inside the population of a colony: the word post-colonial cannot therefore be used in a single sense.

She also discussed the impact of post-structuralist view of history on the post-colonial studies, which rejected the idea of a single linear progression of history and instead advocate a multiplicity of parallel narratives. This coincides with Anne McOintock’s examination of the term “post-colonialism” which also noticed the variety and complexity of the post-colonial situation in different countries.

Anne McOintock insists also on the “multiplicity” of post-colonialism, and she points out that this term itself seems to fail to discredit the idea of “progress” and fail to denote this multiplicity. The prefix “post” suggests a linear structure that orients around the axis of time, the term corresponds hence to and even depends on the idea of linear historical progress. According to McOintock, the term “post-colonialism” suggests too often a premature celebration and runs the risk of obscuring the continuities and discontinuities of colonial and imperial power. The use of the term “post-colonialism”, suggests McOintock, becomes unstable when the ideology of “progress” collapsed with the failure of US economy and Soviet Union. Therefore finally she calls for “rethinking the global situation as a multiplicity of powers and histories” and for innovative and historically nuanced theories which can help us reinstate the discourse of history.

From repression to multiplication: a discourse of sexuality by Foucault

As pointed out by Foucault, since the nineteen century we have witnessed a multiplication of expressions of sexualities, especially of irregular sexualities, ranging from homosexuality who has certainly earned and developed its own discourse, to the once taboo topic: the sexuality of children, in short, all the forms of perverse sexualities that had been repressed by conventions or by law up until then. But Foucault refuses to consider this outburst of once condemned expressions as a “outbreak” caused by the rigidity of repressions, but rather the result of the change in the type of power that exercises on the body and on sex.
According to Foucault, the emergence of the discourses on these peripheral sexualities was conditioned by a change of power. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the discourse of sexuality had centred on matrimonial relations and this was the result of the governing of laws: “canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law” (893). These laws marked any deviation from this centre as abominable and prohibited: debauchery as a sin, incest as a crime, sodomy as a “general unlawfulness”, etc. However, since the nineteenth century, this power mechanism, which was once mainly enforced by laws and sought to eliminate any irregular sexualities, began to change as medicine, pedagogy and psychoanalytic therapy came into its disposal. This new form of power began setting up even closer surveillance on sexuality as they exposed and specified the peripheral sexualities.
Moving away from simple prohibition which clearly has not been able to fulfill the task, new operations have been put into place: “lines of penetration”, “incorporation of perversions”, “specification of individuals” and “devices of sexual saturations”. Instead of clear barriers, indefinite lines of penetration have been constructed by educators and doctors so that the child’s sexuality is always been monitored; instead of juridical incrimination, the psychological, psychiatric and medical category of homosexuality has been incorporated into the discourse: the homosexual has become a specified life form with recognizable traits of morphology and physiology; instead of the symbol of matrimonial relations, the family milieu has become a “complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities” (897). So the characteristic of this new form of power is that it ceased to eliminate the human sexuality to a single form, and that by allowing multiplication of singular sexualities it is able to exercise and assert itself on a larger scale, to gain pleasure from this exercise of monitoring, specification and even inciting, hence the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure”. So if we were to think that the multiplication of unorthodox sexualities in modern societies is the result of the weakening of power, Foucault’s analysis testifies that they are the new centres of power which never cease to loosen its control.

Re-reading Marx

Reading Marx’s theory this week, is actually a re-reading for me. In China, every single middle school and high school student is obligated to take a course that can be called “Political Science” where we learn Marxism and we have to memorize a lot of the concepts and the theory for the exams. And if you have any idea how much Chinese students and parents and teachers and everyone else care about exams (which is somewhat understandable since a good grade is the only thing that can get you into a good university and hence a guarantee of future life), you can imagine how hard we had to work to stuff into our heads ideas like “dialectics”, ” universality and concrete”, “division of labor power”, and “consciousness determined by material life”, etc.
So reading all this again in English, in his original words (our textbooks didn’t quote much), was somewhat a strange experience. A lot of the concepts are so familiar that I was able to read very fast, but I also find myself stopping at a lot of points thinking or rethinking about it. As a teenager, even though I had it memorized like the back of my hands, I don’t think I was taking any interest in what this bearded old man was saying: it made sense but was still a hollow statement that I didn’t concern myself with, probably because I was mostly reading novels.
However, reading it again made me realize the actual impact of his theory. His categorization of the various forms of societies in European history based on the different stages of development in the division of labor and forms of ownership, provided a fresh perspective to examine the history. As literature students, we are accustomed to considering history in terms of literary (ideological) movements, Renaissance, the age of classicism and Les Lumières, etc., and we tend to generally characterize a historic period by its ideological features. But according to Marx, there is another force, a more essential force at play: “Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. […] Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (p.656). So men’s ideas and consciousness are dependant of their material life-process, you can’t ignore the latter and talk about the former independently. And to think that Marx’s work was published in the middle of nineteenth century when Europe had just been taken by the storm of Romanticism, his theory was a strong antidote and suggested that the real and material life of men (and also his social relations) should always be taken into account when considering his ideas and consciousness. He also pointed out that the dominant ideas of a society or an epoch are usually determined by the ruling classes since they have the resources, “while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality […] have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves” (p.657). This immediately reminds me of the “proletariat literature” that was once very popular in China (especially for my father’s generation) and was designed exclusively to represent the lives, the ideas and the interests of the working class, which also made literature a vehicle of ideology and a device at the service of a certain political agenda. This brings me back to the Formalists’ critique…

Some questions about Freud

When I started reading Freud, this first thing that came to my mind was Woody Allen’s earlier films, in which the main character (played by Woody Allen himself) is often plagued by some insecurity and seeks help in therapy. Then by googling Freund and Woody Allen, I found in a blog a few screenshots from his films:
From New York Stories

“I’m fifty years old, I’m a successful lawyer, and I still have unresolved issues with my mother.”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it: don’t get married.”
“Mom, this is not the place…”

“…and here he is when he was two.”
And from Zelig

“My brother beat me. My sister beat my brother. My father beat my sister and my brother and me. My mother beat my father and my sister and me and my brother. The neighbors beat our family. The people down the block beat the neighbors and our family.”

Nostalgia of the real, or the truth

Baudrillard’s article Simulacra and Simulations provides a rather grim analysis of the world: immaculately produced simulations have taken the place of reality, all reality is lost, all we have left is the hyperreal and the truth has been replaced by simulations that are impossible to determine as true or false.
This critique of the society of our times (Disneyland, Watergate, etc) rests on the nostalgia of a time when the real was represented instead of produced, nostalgia of ancient times. In his definition of the concept of simulation, Baudrillard uses a series of parallelism to show its opposition to the representations of reality that used to be: ” it no longer has to be rational, […] it is nothing more than operational. […] it is no longer enveloped by an imagery, it is no longer real at all. […] it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Baudrillard, 366).
This concept of simulation relies largely on the comparison to a time where signs and significations haven’t taken over, and that brings me back to Derrida and his analysis of non phonetic writing. According to Derrida in “Of Grammatology”, our society is experiencing an inflation of the sign “language” and hence an inflation of signs (which is echoed in Baudrillard’s critique of the proliferation of the signs of the real), and it is due to (if I understood correctly) the death of the speech – the signifier in Saussure’s term, and the dominance of the non-phonetic writing. Surprisingly, Derrida was also referring to ancient times, times of Socrates and Plato and the Middle Ages, to illustrate the importance of the signifier and its relation with truth. The sound or phonè of language is closely related to “the feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally” (Derrida, 307), and to the nature. And according to its relationship to the nature, the writing can also be divided into “natural and universal writing” which is united to the voice, and nonphonetic writing which betrays life by “sterilizing or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the letter, […] it is the principle of death and of difference in the becoming of being” (Derrida, 318). I was surprised to see a similar death of truth in nonphonetic writing as the death of real by Baudrillard, and a common nostalgia for a time where a natural connection between the real and its representations were valued.

(Image by Moebius)

Death of the author?

It’s curious to see that several of us are feeling a little skeptical about the announcement of the “death of the author” and about the absolute power of interpretation given to the new-born reader. Admittedly I am also among those who were asking themselves: ” does the author has to die?”, it seems that we are somehow upset and feel resistant about this notion that the author figure should be completely erased from our reading experience.
However if you think about it, it is perfectly normal that these theorists would want to claim the importance of the role played by the readers in the equation, and it is true that the readers’ reception of the texts contributes just as much to a literary work, so what is really this reluctance in us to let go of the “author”? Maybe it’s because of the brutal image that Barthes’ announcement suggests: the death? Maybe it’s because of the insecurity brought about by the absolute absence of author/authority? Then I realized my emotional response to this announcement just goes to prove how deeply rooted is the author figure in my mind: during years of literary studies, we always start with an author’s biography before even looking at the text, a literary work is so closely related to its author that we always say “I love Flaubert’s works”, and we even invent adjectives like “Proustien” to talk about the style of the author. So what if some readers (like me) find it extremely difficult to exclude author from the text? I agree with Foucault when he says: “it is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared”, what we need is a closer look at how the concept of “author” came to be and how it influences our reading experience.
According to Foucault in “What is an author?”, he states that what we call “author” is a “rational being” constructed as a result of the “author function” of discourses. The individual being/author in whom the critics discern “a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power, or a ‘design’, the milieu in which writing originates”, becomes the author we know. (Constructed only by critics? Don’t the readers and their interpretations contribute to this construction of “author” as well?) The author, according to Foucault, “is a certain functional principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The word “function” implies that “author” is used to serve a certain end, and that we have the need to use “author” to constrain fiction, a need that Foucault explains as “we fear the proliferation of meaning”. This statement somewhat explains the reluctance to make the author completely disappear: the author has descended from the state of the Author (as indicated by Barthes), but it’s not completely gone, for many readers it still is one of the means for interpreting the text.

The science of literary/linguistic studies

It surprised me how frequently we talk about science or scientific approaches when dealing with literary and linguistic studies in the pages we read this week. From Russian Formalists who were initially inspired by philosophers of science like Edmund Husserl (3), to the French Structuralists who were greatly influenced by the studies of Ferdinand de Saussure and his “science of semiology” (60), it seems that these studies of literature and of language have sought to develop a systematic knowledge of the subject. I think we can even recognize an evolution of such effort.
First, the Formalists pointed out that literature should no longer be considered a device that carries out sociological or historical ideas, but it ought to be studied separately and independently, through “the investigation of the specific properties of literary material, of the properties that distinguish such material from material of any other kind” (Eichenbaum, 7). The Formalists intended to, through rigorous examination, determine the nature of “literariness” (Jakobson) that distinguish literature from other subjects. This attempt resembles a lot to a scientific research, whose object of studies is literature and during which the Formalists examined the specificity of poetic language, questioned the traditionally neglected notion of “form” and scrutinized the concept of “defamiliarization” which Shklovsky found to be an important technique and procedure in literary works.
The legacy of these studies later influenced the French Structuralism in that the Structuralists also sought to understand “the internal system or order of linguistic, cultural and literary phenomena” (54). But the greatest inspiration for Structuralist studies was the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose approach was an even more scientific one: he considered language as a homogeneous system of signs (he even compared it to algebra(71)) and tried to develop “a science that studies the life of signs within society”(60), semiology. (Much like what the Formalists did with literature: studying the subject as an independent system but Saussure took it further.) Upon establishing a set of terminology and notions in his studies: sign, signifier, signified and semiology, Saussure had created a scientific module which Structuralists later borrowed to analyze cultural and literary phenomena, for example Roland Barthes. And it’s very interesting to read Barthes’ analysis of various social signs and it seems that he has begun to apply the rules established by Saussure in concrete examples.
Here I stop at The Archaeology of Knowledge, that I’m re-reading for the fourth time and still fail to understand fully or see a connection with previous texts. So I hope our discussions in class will help me with that.

Hello

Hello everyone,

My name is Han and I’m in the French Master’s program.
To be honest, since I have little background in literary theory, the amount of reading and the efforts needed to digest all the information are overwhelming this first week. I hope this is only temporary and it gets easier as I read more and after we talk about it in class.
Back to reading!