Language as Control

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01-12-2006, 08:30 AM
blp

Having a smidge more knowledge of Lacanian theory than of Foucault, I'm going to allow myself to be blown by the prevailing wind.

What you say sounds right, Fayefaye, (though I'm hardly any authority) and I think it's fairly easy to see from this how Lacan, who began as a structuralist, ends up relating to other post structuralists: to say that all signifiers are defined by lack seems to me to really be saying that their definitions themselves are marked by lack, incompleteness (though I believe 'lack' itself has wider connotations in Lacan's system). This means that they can only have meaning provisionally and contingently as part of a system of relations. A good example, would be the signifier 'god', since it might be seen to be analagous to Lacan's 'phallus', yet is constantly incomplete in its meaning until 'completed' by other signifiers: 'God, I'm tired', 'God is great', 'God does not exist', 'a minor god in the pantheon', 'this is my god-son', 'god the father, god the son, god the holy ghost'.

Even apart from the religious connotations, this relates to questions of power. The assertion that there is no transcendental signifier seems to me to be a statement of the impossibility of absolutism. Once you accept it, you are logically less likely to accept assertions of absolute certainty about meaning from those in power.

To throw a few more names and tricky words into the mix, this seems to me to relate well to Gilles Deleuze and his sometime writing partner Felix Guattari. In their book 'A Thousand Plateaus' they question why things are so often structured on an arboreal model (i.e. like a tree, in which everything branches out from a central stem or trunk) and argue instead for thinking in terms of rhizomes (subterranean node and stem structures such as potatoes, where no individual element can be said to have centrality). This sounds very like a signifying chain, but I think part of the point is that here the chain is non-linear and forms something more like a web, each element constantly relating to the others in a multitude of different ways at any one time.

No surprise perhaps that these two were interested in schizophrenia: "A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world." Note: 'relationship'. At the beginning of 'A Thousand Plateaus' they describe the writing of it by saying 'Since each of us was several, that was already quite a lot'. Again, I think the scepticism of even a single true identity within an individual this implies relates to what Unnamable was saying earlier (much earlier) about desire and the real:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unnamable

If you look up a word in a dictionary, you will simply find more words. Look them up and more words are offered and so on, ad infinitum). To Lacan, this is what desire is - an endlessly deferred search for what we lack, which Lacan calls the ‘real’. So there is a correspondence between the world of language and the world of desire. Lacan says “Language is what hollows being into desire.” We will never reach our destination, the final meaning that completes us although we will never cease in our search. We have to make do instead with substitutes, as is the case with the endlessly deferred signifiers that prevent us from attaining some transcendental meaning.

and perhaps the thousand plateaus are the provisional meanings and identities we can move between, with no promise or prospect of a single peak to conquer or 'real' to arrive at.

Again, this brings us back to the subject of this thread. The American philosopher Richard Rorty relates Deleuzian ideas to those of humanist philosophers such as William James to make an argument for democracy. In his view, democracy is made of a constant web of negotiations between different positions, none of which can be said to have centrality - a rhizomatic model. If you accept that this relates to a signifying chain, what's particularly interesting about it in the context of this thread is that the structure of language itself becomes the model for a political structure the purpose of which is to limit, as much as possible, the use of language as a method of control. Freedom of speech becomes crucial in order to allow the negotiations that are the engine of democracy to continue.

Coincidentally, during the time I was reading Rorty in Tokyo, a Japanese girl asked me if I could explain the difference between fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism and democracy. A great chat ensued, not surprisingly and what I realised in having to think this through was that democracy was the one system built not on the idea of perfection, but imperfection. It's a nebulous thing, not fixed. The others think they have the answer, democracy knows it doesn't and never will and will only be defined by the often conflicting voices of its constituent parts. Churchill's formulation of it as 'least worst' becomes somewhat beside the point.

To nod back to Foucault, he once said, 'Perhaps one day this century will be seen as Deleuzian'.
01-12-2006, 08:58 AM
blp

P.S. Here's a Deleuze quote from the seventies that suits this thread:

'One should know what is currently happening in the realm of books. For several years now, we've been living in a period of reaction in every domain. There is no reason to think that books are to be spared from this reaction. People are in the process of fabricating for us a literary space, as well as judicial, economic, and political spaces, which are completely reactionary, prefabricated, and overwhelming/crushing.'
01-12-2006, 09:32 AM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

a Japanese girl asked me if I could explain the difference between fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism and democracy.

Marxism is the exploitation of man by man and Capitalism is the other way round.

PS I will get to a serious response but I thought that one might make you smile, even though you've no doubt heard it before.
01-12-2006, 09:37 AM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

From what I gather, it seems that the 'phallus' is to be the centre of the system of signification (the transcendental signifier, analogous to the 'God' of the system of signification, because it is the centre of the system but not bound by any of its rules. the centre is on the outside!! (why are philosophers so painfully circular??)) - so it would be a position of complete fullness, a position which holds the other signifiers in place an limits 'play' (the tendency for the relationship between signifer and signified to shift, I think...). ie, a stable position which is not defined by lack. Which, in a system of signification where EVERYTHING is defined by lack, is actually non-existant.

That makes sense to me (mind you, that’s no recommendation). I remember another bit of Lacan that I found both fascinating and infuriating. It’s from The Mirror Stage part of Écrits. The abstruse style is one of the things I find infuriating.

“That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognises that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.”

Is this true? If it is, then there must be some link between self-awareness and sexual maturation. An awareness of separateness, presumably, is the stimulus for the passage from one realm to another. If it is true then it takes me into realms I simply don’t have the capacity to navigate. The reason I am doubtful is that Lacan goes on to mention, believe it or not, the locust (I must admit I did know this earlier when I brought up the subject :brow: ):

“Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.”

Apart from the fact that I had to look up half those words (anyone seen that great Tony Hancock sketch where he’s reading Bertrand Russell?), I’m not sure that’s true about the locust. I have some memory of reading that it was physical touch on the back legs that triggered the change. Still, the stuff about the pigeons is worth a second thought.
01-12-2006, 10:49 AM
blp

Hello, I found this, which makes the link between Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari clear.

http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Deleuze.html
01-12-2006, 11:43 AM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

“That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognises that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.”

Is this true? If it is, then there must be some link between self-awareness and sexual maturation. An awareness of separateness, presumably, is the stimulus for the passage from one realm to another. If it is true then it takes me into realms I simply don’t have the capacity to navigate. The reason I am doubtful is that Lacan goes on to mention, believe it or not, the locust (I must admit I did know this earlier when I brought up the subject :brow: ):

“Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.”

Apart from the fact that I had to look up half those words (anyone seen that great Tony Hancock sketch where he’s reading Bertrand Russell?), I’m not sure that’s true about the locust. I have some memory of reading that it was physical touch on the back legs that triggered the change. Still, the stuff about the pigeons is worth a second thought.

yech, I can see what you mean about reading it (the word homeomorphic sent me to the dictionary, and when I got there I was disgusted to see how unnecessary the use of the word was... to save others the time: n. a correspondence between the points of two geometrical shapes or two spaces in which each element can be paired with one from the other without any remaining (from the Encarta Dictionary in Word :p ) - ie two things that look the same. 'hey, that locust looks like me.')

Well, I suppose 'intuitively' (I'm pretty sure we've had a discussion about the unstable foundations of this word...) you would think that a pidgeon wouldn't need to see another pidgeon to mature sexually. But there is a simple way to find out. Kidnap a baby pidgeon and keep it as a pet for a while (minus the mirror)
01-12-2006, 12:20 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

People are in the process of fabricating for us a literary space, as well as judicial, economic, and political spaces, which are completely reactionary, prefabricated, and overwhelming/crushing.'

I wouldn’t argue with that. You like Dylan. What’s really good about that line from ‘Not Dark Yet’ is that he sings, “There's not even room enough to be anywhere”, and not ‘go’ anywhere as would be more usual. That’s how I see the dominant discourses – they don’t leave you anywhere to be. It links in nicely with Baudrillard and ‘the loss of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he sees post-modern culture as having dispensed with everything except signs and signs for which there are no referents at that. All that exists in Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ is surface without depth. The distinction between reality and illusion is eroded and life turns into MTV.

I can understand what he means from an early example of such an idea – in Richard Eyre’s ‘The Ploughman’s Lunch’. Anyone outside of the UK probably won’t know this but a ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’ is a meal popular in English pubs. It often consists of a chunk of granary bread, a lump of cheese, a pickled onion, green salad, occasionally a hard-boiled egg and something called ‘Branston Pickle’, which is a sort of relish, I think. Most people assume this rustic fare is the traditional food of broad-shouldered agricultural workers of the 19th century. It wasn’t. It was ‘thought up’ by ad. men in the 1960s in an attempt to encourage people to buy more food in pubs. Similarly, I mentioned elsewhere on this site that none of the Gospels mention an ox or a donkey and that many 13th century paintings set the scene in a cave. Yet when we think of the Nativity scene, we picture it the way it is on all those Christmas Cards we send or on those inept fridge door drawings done by the children. For all intents and purposes, the only ‘reality’ we have is the most dominantly reproduced one and we aren’t that bothered about whether or not it has any similarity to any actual scene, as long as its consistent with our current version of reality.

Baudrillard goes much further than this but it’s not a bad way to begin thinking about it. There is a useful and fairly short introduction to the idea of simulacra and simulation here - http://www.uta.edu/english/hawk/semiotics/baud.htm
The bit about Pop Music is quite accurate.

One of Baudrillard’s infamous pronouncements was when he said that Disneyland is the ‘real’ America:

“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”

Virgil, I apologise for any extreme emotions you might be feeling.
01-12-2006, 01:26 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

That’s how I see the dominant discourses – they don’t leave you anywhere to be.

Yes, that's how I feel them.
It's salient that that Deleuze quote comes from the seventies. The entire decade must have been a taking stock for people like him after the failure of the 68 uprising in Paris. The backlash against the sixties that defines so much culture now must already have been gathering a significant head of steam. Cinema, in particular, which was seen as central to the coming revolution during the sixties, changed significantly after 68 in France. Up to that point, Jean Luc Godard, in particular, believed he was making films to bring about a revolution. Not one French film of the seventies is as experimental or challenging as his great films of the late sixties, 'One Plus One', 'La Chinoise' and 'Weekend'. Nevertheless, Godard complained that throughout the sixties all he was doing was rattling his cup against the bars of his cell and that the more angrily he did this, the more he was applauded. He seems in this to be pointing already to the way in which oppositional, revolutionary discourse can be co-opted by the dominant discourse and rendered impotent.
01-12-2006, 01:33 PM
blp

Re: Baudrillard. I'm not wrong in thinking that in Plato, Simulacra or the Realm of Simulacra means something rather like Hell, am I?

Based just on what you say, it seems at first glance as if Baudrillard diverges from Lacan and the development of his reasoning in Deleuze & Guattari in suggesting that our alienation from 'the real' is something created by the dominant discourses rather than merely an effect of their being no 'real' to begin with.

I'm just about to leave work, so will return to this later.
01-13-2006, 10:52 AM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

For all intents and purposes, the only ‘reality’ we have is the most dominantly reproduced one and we aren’t that bothered about whether or not it has any similarity to any actual scene, as long as its consistent with our current version of reality.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Based just on what you say, it seems at first glance as if Baudrillard diverges from Lacan and the development of his reasoning in Deleuze & Guattari in suggesting that our alienation from 'the real' is something created by the dominant discourses rather than merely an effect of their being no 'real' to begin with.

hmm... What is real? If there was a real world, then how could we know it? I think it sounds more like, even if there was a real world, we couldn't differentiate it from an illusion, or from a world presented to us. Reality and simulation have no line drawn down the middle; no means for differentiation.

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but I'm reminded of part of the film He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (nothing special, not particularly worth watching. The book's pretty funny.). Anyway, a character is telling a story about a man who lost his wife. The wife is duplicated, but because she's like a photocopy, he hates her. When the duplicate realises that he hates her, she tries to kill herself, but can't (something about her being like a phoenix, she keeps coming back to life. I wasn't really paying much attention...). When he sees the pain she's going through, he's able to love her for what she is. The fact she wasn't his original wife (sort of like a signifier for his past wife, I suppose) ceases to matter.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

In Simulacra and Simulation, he sees post-modern culture as having dispensed with everything except signs and signs for which there are no referents at that. All that exists in Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ is surface without depth. The distinction between reality and illusion is eroded and life turns into MTV

This sounds really interesting. Is it that people can no longer tell between signifier and signified (like, looking at a pretty sky reminds you of a Monet painting and you feel like it should be the other way around) or that there ceases to be a signified at all? (And if so, how can signifieds cease to exist?)
01-13-2006, 12:26 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

This sounds really interesting. Is it that people can no longer tell between signifier and signified (like, looking at a pretty sky reminds you of a Monet painting and you feel like it should be the other way around) or that there ceases to be a signified at all? (And if so, how can signifieds cease to exist?)

I'm not sure about this, Fayefaye, but I think this is all complicated by the fact that the signified is not the thing in itself, but the concept of it, e.g. the signifier 'cow' signifies - means - the concept of cow, which is therefore the signified. The cow in itself is what is referred to and hence is the referrent.

Baudrillard may then be talking about a world devoid of meaningful concepts, but full of appearances that suggest meaning, tricking us into thinking there's something behind them when there isn't.
01-13-2006, 01:21 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

hmm... What is real? If there was a real world, then how could we know it? I think it sounds more like, even if there was a real world, we couldn't differentiate it from an illusion, or from a world presented to us. Reality and simulation have no line drawn down the middle; no means for differentiation.

I sort of agree with you here. I don’t think whether or not something is ‘real’ is of much relevance to Baudrillard. He is suggesting something more about the nature of the reality we ‘have’.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but I'm reminded of part of the film He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (nothing special, not particularly worth watching. The book's pretty funny.). Anyway, a character is telling a story about a man who lost his wife. The wife is duplicated, but because she's like a photocopy, he hates her. When the duplicate realises that he hates her, she tries to kill herself, but can't (something about her being like a phoenix, she keeps coming back to life. I wasn't really paying much attention...). When he sees the pain she's going through, he's able to love her for what she is. The fact she wasn't his original wife (sort of like a signifier for his past wife, I suppose) ceases to matter.

I don’t know either the film or the book but I wonder if you’ve ever applied similar thinking to ‘Vertigo’. The exploration is certainly darker in ‘Vertigo’ than what you describe but there are parallels.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

This sounds really interesting. Is it that people can no longer tell between signifier and signified (like, looking at a pretty sky reminds you of a Monet painting and you feel like it should be the other way around) or that there ceases to be a signified at all? (And if so, how can signifieds cease to exist?)

It’s a little more complicated but also problematic than that. Baudrillard thinks first of a sign which is a surface indication of an underlying reality or depth. Then he considers what it means if a sign is not a surface indication of depth but simply of more signs. The resulting system is what he calls a simulacrum.
There are four stages to the process by which signs become simply empty.
1. The sign represents a basic reality;
2. The misinterprets or distorts the reality behind it;
3. The sign disguises the fact that there is no reality behind it;
4. The sign bears no relation to reality at all.

The first two are straightforward but the other two are less so. According to Baudrillard, Disneyland is a third order sign – it conceals the fact that there is no reality behind it. (It seems like a second order sign as well to me.) I suppose what he means by this the ‘reality’ of people’s everyday lives is so at odds with what they are being told it is by the all-pervasive signs of a media saturated culture, that one view has to go and the one that goes is the ‘real’ one, where we sweat, defecate, cry, die, are unhappy, in fact, most of the things we don’t do in Disneyland. We have come to believe that ‘real’ life is the one we stare at through our computer screens, are fed by the glass teat of television or see up on the big screens or billboards. It’s a little similar to Althusser’s ‘interpellated’ individual. I have a lot of sympathy with this view. It explains to me how the same person can have many utterly different sets of values while seeing no inconsistency whatsoever.

Take a simple example from Literature. I once did a school assembly using Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ to highlight the problems of world hunger. I ‘modernised’ the language and situation and advocated, as Swift does, eating children as a solution. A few of the other teachers who were present at the assembly complained that my ‘little stunt’ was ‘profoundly offensive and appallingly tasteless.” I was summoned to the Head’s office to explain myself. She was in no mood for taking prisoners. As you can imagine, I have had a number of run-ins with the stupidity and insolence of office, ;) so she was going to make the most of her opportunity. The wonderful thing was however (which I knew when I chose Swift), that she immediately became far less sure of herself when I pointed out that the idea was Swift’s and that the work was considered one of the finest pieces of irony in the English language. It was also a set text at the time, so she was going to look rather stupid chastising me for bringing one of her own students’ set texts to life. Most of the students and teachers were talking about that assembly well into the afternoon (which is unheard of longevity for an act of collective worship :) ). Why is it that she can thrill over the genius of Shakespeare’s Tragedies while sipping her glass of chardonnay, yet she doesn’t really see human experience as tragic at all? When Lear goes on about ‘unaccommodated man’, we all marvel at his humanity, yet I look away from beggars every day. I have to. Perhaps I am reassured when I read King Lear that in essence, I am nice, I care.

What I find appealing about Baudrillard is less anything he has to say about order of signs and more of what he suggests about this utterly impoverished and crass culture in which I find myself like some confused child plunged into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape.
01-13-2006, 03:19 PM
Xamonas Chegwe

The story that the character tells in the film sounds a little like a central part of "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem - filmed in Russia & in Hollywood with George Clooney - but the book beats both films hands down. I recommend the book if you like thoughtful, philosophical sci-fi. In fact, I recommend anything by Lem, especially "The Cyberiad".
01-13-2006, 04:51 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Re: Baudrillard. I'm not wrong in thinking that in Plato, Simulacra or the Realm of Simulacra means something rather like Hell, am I?

Sorry, don’t know.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Based just on what you say, it seems at first glance as if Baudrillard diverges from Lacan and the development of his reasoning in Deleuze & Guattari in suggesting that our alienation from 'the real' is something created by the dominant discourses rather than merely an effect of their being no 'real' to begin with.

He might agree with you but I’m not sure he’d see it in those terms. I don’t think ‘alienation’ or ‘dominant discourses’ are where his emphasis lies. He seems unconcerned with whether or not there is any ‘real’ to begin with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Baudrillard may then be talking about a world devoid of meaningful concepts, but full of appearances that suggest meaning, tricking us into thinking there's something behind them when there isn't.

I think it’s more as I describe it in my response to fayefaye. The telescreens keep telling us that the chocolate ration has gone up by another 10% and we believe it by ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps this is partly because the telescreens have morphed into many forms and moved into almost every area of our existence. It’s also a case of ‘as long as you’re comfortable, it feels like freedom’. There’s obviously a lot more to him than that, and I just know that your use of the word ‘trickery’ will be like blood to a shark for anyone insistent that theory sees things in terms of conspiracy. :)
01-13-2006, 05:16 PM
Virgil

To pick up where I left off (post # 135), logos, meaning, has as far as I know now three philosophic possibilities: Meaning from forms (Plato), meaning from mimeses (Aristotle, as empiricist), and meaning from language (postmodernists, probably initiated from Nietzsche). Listen I happen to think that the postmodernist thought here is an interesting philosophic permutation of a long held debate.

Certain tenets, however, come out from this. Reality is derived from language. Language is of shifting meaning. The syllogism then follows that reality itself is not fixed. It then follows that the author himself is writing from perspectives he’s not even aware of, and his meaning of his own text is suspect or at least is free to be re-interpreted. We can see why then those that have argued for language as controlling humanity feel so comfortable in the postmodernist camp. What the postmodernist are saying is that all language is ideological, whether it is of the sun rising or the simple exchange of money for a product at a department store.

However, I don’t subscribe to it. I’ll address the nihilism in another post. But let me go through three pertinent examples.

Example #1. Let’s take an example of oppression, slavery. Possibilities: (a) Platonic, the enslaver thought up slavery because the form existed and then acted on it; (b) Aristotelian, the enslaver enslaved and therefore generated the form/concept of slavery; (c) postmodern, the enslaver thought of the word enslave which created the form and then the reality. Which meets the test of reality or even common sense? a or b is probably a matter of preference (and that’s why this debate has been going on for thousands of years), but I tend to side with b because other than mathematics I find it difficult to understand how forms precede the real thing. But c is frankly ridiculous.

Example #2. Let’s take an example from feminism, pornography. Ever since Hugh Heffner created that magazine called Playboy in the 1950’s, each subsequent decade has seen an exponential rise (at least here in the United States) in pornography as measured by its share of the GDP. Now the language of the immorality of pornography has been imbedded into western culture since Moses and the Old Testament. The language of the feminists has dominated the discourse also at least since the 1950’s, where pornography is stated to be a degradation of women (one of the rare times I happen to agree with the feminists) and an objectification of women. Now given all of this language both from the political right (immorality) and the political left (degradation), if the postmodernist were correct, then language should be reducing the number of women going into pornography. But just the opposite is happening. The reality is that once society (power structure, if you will) consented to not physically clamping down (mimesis) on porn, women, men, everyone involved were free to choose.

Example #3. One from personal experience. I’m of Italian-American ethnicity. Nearly every movie, TV show, novel that features Italian-Americans associates them with the mafia. It’s become part of our folklore. Every politician of I-A ethnicity, of whichever political party, is at sometime or other smeared with the association. Nearly every time I introduce (my real name is very Italian sounding) myself across the country, if it catches someone’s attention they will make a joke of it. I’ve just taken a lecture of the American Identity, where the lecturer went through about 40-50 famous Americans from our history across various times and backgrounds; the only one of I-A ethnicity was Al Capone. I’m not complaining but it is a little insulting. When we were children, my friends (also of I-A ethnicity) would play act mobsters, taking on the names of famous mobsters. So, we did absorbed it. However, studies have shown that at most the percentage of I-A who in any way are associated with the mafia is less than 1 %. Let me repeat, less than one percent. Don’t you think that given the bombardment of cultural language/icons/definition that more than one percent would be associated with the mafia? The correlation isn’t there. Language does not define you.

I still have more points to make. Enough for now. Wait for next installment.
01-13-2006, 10:51 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Reality is derived from language. Language is of shifting meaning. The syllogism then follows that reality itself is not fixed.

Virgil, do you actually read my posts? When I say that ‘reality is constructed through language’, I try to justify what I’ve said by giving examples or offering an explanation of what some theorists have said. You say ‘reality is derived from language’, but simply say it and then repeat it without dealing with any of the points I raised since the last time you said it. The ‘reasoning’ you offer above begins with a false assumption, which then generates further unsubstantiated assertions. At no point do you dispense with the idea that the world is ‘out there’ and we name it. That’s not how things work. It’s far more complicated. The reason you end up simply reasserting the same position is simply because you are ignoring every question that challenges your assumptions. You say ‘Language is of shifting meaning’ – If by this you mean that the meanings of words and concepts vary according to context, historical period, culture etc., then yes, they do. You then say that it ‘follows that reality is not fixed’, which it isn’t. But I believe that in such a statement you mean some ‘reality’ that exists independently of the human mind – the world ‘out there’. By saying that reality is not fixed, I am not saying that there is a physical world ‘out there’ that is simply like liquid, as if physical objects morph to suit our language as it changes. I am simply saying that without the systems of meaning that we have, our experience of that world out there would be other than it is. The world itself would not change, simply our perception/understanding of it. The most obvious and simplest example of this is our past assumption that the earth is flat. The earth was whatever it is regardless of what we saw it is. Only our ideas changed, the physical earth itself didn’t.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

It then follows that the author himself is writing from perspectives he’s not even aware of, and his meaning of his own text is suspect or at least is free to be re-interpreted. We can see why then those that have argued for language as controlling humanity feel so comfortable in the postmodernist camp.

What do you mean ‘suspect’? Do you mean not the right one according to you? Are you saying that texts are not free to be re-interpreted? None of us know what perspectives will be available in the future but I don’t think that’s what you meant. I think you meant that it’s incorrect to assume there can be any meaning in a text that an author did not put there in the very act of producing that text.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

What the postmodernist are saying is that all language is ideological, whether it is of the sun rising or the simple exchange of money for a product at a department store.

Yes, all language is ideological to a greater or lesser extent. Once again though, your example makes absolutely clear that you are completely unaware that concepts are constructions. The idea of exchanging money for a product is ideological in a very obvious way. In this case, it is so in a much more conventional sense of the meaning of ideology – Capitalism. Firstly you need to have a system of money in place. Then you have to assign objects a monetary value (which I assume they don’t intrinsically have). Nothing might seem as natural as going into a shop to purchase some goods but it hasn’t always been so and probably isn’t so now for your average Masai warrior.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Example #1. Let’s take an example of oppression, slavery. Possibilities: (a) Platonic, the enslaver thought up slavery because the form existed and then acted on it; (b) Aristotelian, the enslaver enslaved and therefore generated the form/concept of slavery; (c) postmodern, the enslaver thought of the word enslave which created the form and then the reality. Which meets the test of reality or even common sense? a or b is probably a matter of preference (and that’s why this debate has been going on for thousands of years), but I tend to side with b because other than mathematics I find it difficult to understand how forms precede the real thing. But c is frankly ridiculous.

Yet again, you are ascribing to postmodernism thinking of which it is simply not guilty. I have already explained this. No one is saying that someone thought up the word slavery and then decided who would be the first slaves. This is how I see it: At some point in human history, the condition of slavery came into being. However, perhaps at first the ruling ideology saw nothing ‘wrong’ with treating certain people as slaves. They might not have seen them as ‘slaves’ at all (or even as 'people' for that matter). Perhaps the ruling group genuinely believed that such a system was natural and common sense. It’s even possible that they called them slaves but they cannot have applied that word in anything like the sense that we mean it now. So the condition of slavery is in place and then discourses (and I think in the context of language as power, it is better to speak of ‘discourses’) compete for ways of determining what it ‘means’.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Example #2. Let’s take an example from feminism, pornography. Ever since Hugh Heffner created that magazine called Playboy in the 1950’s, each subsequent decade has seen an exponential rise (at least here in the United States) in pornography as measured by its share of the GDP. Now the language of the immorality of pornography has been imbedded into western culture since Moses and the Old Testament. The language of the feminists has dominated the discourse also at least since the 1950’s, where pornography is stated to be a degradation of women (one of the rare times I happen to agree with the feminists) and an objectification of women. Now given all of this language both from the political right (immorality) and the political left (degradation), if the postmodernist were correct, then language should be reducing the number of women going into pornography.

On what basis do you make this astounding assumption? Also, if your criticism of feminist/postmodernist theory is that it doesn’t prevent women from entering porn, then the questions I have are endless. Firstly, if Literature is so enlightening and ennobling, why has it failed so miserably in the case of humanity? Secondly, not all feminists would agree that pornography degrades women. Camille Paglia has a very different view.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

But just the opposite is happening.

And you think the explanation for this is the failure of postmodernist thought? You don’t think the fact that the pornography industry generates such enormous profits might be worth considering? Or perhaps the way that women are represented in all forms of media? 80% of women we see on television are between the ages of 18 and 30. Why is that?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Example #3. One from personal experience. I’m of Italian-American ethnicity. Nearly every movie, TV show, novel that features Italian-Americans associates them with the mafia. It’s become part of our folklore. Every politician of I-A ethnicity, of whichever political party, is at sometime or other smeared with the association. Nearly every time I introduce (my real name is very Italian sounding) myself across the country, if it catches someone’s attention they will make a joke of it. I’ve just taken a lecture of the American Identity, where the lecturer went through about 40-50 famous Americans from our history across various times and backgrounds; the only one of I-A ethnicity was Al Capone. I’m not complaining but it is a little insulting. When we were children, my friends (also of I-A ethnicity) would play act mobsters, taking on the names of famous mobsters. So, we did absorbed it. However, studies have shown that at most the percentage of I-A who in any way are associated with the mafia is less than 1 %. Let me repeat, less than one percent. Don’t you think that given the bombardment of cultural language/icons/definition that more than one percent would be associated with the mafia? The correlation isn’t there. Language does not define you.

This is even more astounding! You give a great example of the power of ideology (as well the way it masks its own status as ideology). People’s perceptions of reality (in this case, less than 1%) do not match the ones that our systems of meaning suggest. When most people think of an IA, they think of the person their culture has constructed (and this time you must see that it’s constructed because otherwise how could it be less than 1%?), rather than what you might call the ‘real’ IA. Theory doesn’t claim that watching ‘The Sopranos’ makes us want to join the mafia! It suggests rather that our perceptions of what the mafia is and our assumptions about IAs are dependent on the way things are represented in the relevant available sign systems. If those systems repeatedly reinforce the idea that all IAs are gangsters, it’s hardly surprising that so many people assume that it’s true.
01-13-2006, 11:06 PM
The Unnamable

Baudrillard and the loss of the real:
This was sent to me by a very kind German lady. Fans of The Matrix might find it interesting:

"The question is, why would anyone think that selling shoes could be subversive? To understand the answer, it is useful to take a closer look at the first film in the Matrix trilogy. Lots has been written about the “philosophy of the matrix”, most of it wrong. To understand the first film, one must look very carefully at the scene in which Neo sees the white rabbit. He hands a book to his friend, and on the spine of that book we can see the title: Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. Many commentators on the film saw the core idea of The Matrix– that the world we live in might be an elaborate illusion, that our brains are simply being fed sensory input by machines, input that tricks us into thinking that we live and interact with a world of physical objects – as simply an updated version of René Descartes’s sceptical “How do you know that you’re not dreaming?” thought experiment. This is a misinterpretation. The Matrix is not intended as a representation of an epistemological dilemma. It is a metaphor for a political idea, one that traces its origins back to the ‘60s. It is an idea that found its highest expression in the work of Guy Debord, unofficial leader of the Situationist International, and his later disciple Jean Baudrillard.

Debord was a radical Marxist, author of The Society of the Spectacle and one of the prime movers behind the Paris 1968 uprising. His thesis was simple. The world that we live in is not real. Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertisement and the mass media. Thus every part of human life has been drawn into “the spectacle”, which itself is nothing but a system of symbols and representations, governed by its own internal logic. “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” Debord wrote. Thus we live in a world of total ideology, in which we are completely alienated from our essential nature. The spectacle is a dream that has become necessary, “the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.”

(That last bit made me laugh out loud.)

In such a world, the old-fashioned concern for social justice and the abolition of class-based society becomes outmoded. In the society of the spectacle, the new revolutionary must seek two things: “consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness.” In other words, we must try to discover our own sources of pleasure, independent of the needs that are imposed on us by the system, and we must try to wake up from the nightmare of “the spectacle.” Like Neo, we must choose the red pill. In other words, when it comes to rebellion and political activism, there is no point trying to change little details in the system. What does it matter who is rich and who is poor? Or who has the right to vote and who doesn’t? Or who has access to jobs and opportunities? These are all just ephemera, illusions. If commodities are just images, who cares if some people have more of them, others less? What we need to do is recognize that the entire culture, the entire society, is a waking dream – one we must reject in its entirety.

Of course, this idea is hardly original. It is one of the oldest themes in western civilisation. In The Republic, Plato compared life on earth to a cave, in which prisoners are shackled to the floor, seeing only shadows flickering across the wall from the light of a fire. When one prisoner escapes and makes his way to the surface, he discovers that the world he had been living in was nothing but a web of illusions. He returns to the cave bearing the news, yet finds that his former companions are still embroiled in petty disputes and bickering. He finds it difficult to take these “politics” seriously.

Centuries later, early Christians would appeal to this story as a way of explaining away the execution of Jesus by the Romans. Prior to this event, it had been assumed that the arrival of the Messiah would herald the creation of the kingdom of God here on earth. The death of Jesus obviously put an end to these expectations. Some of his followers therefore chose to reinterpret these events as a sign that the real kingdom of God would be not on this earth, but in the afterlife. They claimed that Jesus had been resurrected in order to convey this news – like Plato’s prisoner returning to the cave. Thus the idea that the world we live in is a veil of illusion is not new. What does change, however, is the popular understanding of what it takes to throw off this illusion. For Plato, there was no question that breaking free would require decades of disciplined study and philosophical reflection. Christians thought that it would be even harder – that death was the only way to gain access to the “real” world beyond. For Debord and the Situationists, on the other hand, the veil of illusion could be pierced much more easily. All that it takes is some slight dissonance, a sign that something’s not right in the world around us. This can be provoked by a work of art, an act of protest or even an article of clothing. In Debord’s view, “disturbances with the lowliest and most ephemeral of origins have eventually disrupted the order of the world."

Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter
01-13-2006, 11:31 PM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

I don’t know either the film or the book but I wonder if you’ve ever applied similar thinking to ‘Vertigo’. The exploration is certainly darker in ‘Vertigo’ than what you describe but there are parallels.

You should really read the book, it's a lot lighter than philosophy and good for a laugh. It's about a guy's experiences living in sharehouses across the East coast of Australia, and all the crazy people he meets. Good point about Vertigo.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Take a simple example from Literature. I once did a school assembly using Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ to highlight the problems of world hunger. I ‘modernised’ the language and situation and advocated, as Swift does, eating children as a solution. A few of the other teachers who were present at the assembly complained that my ‘little stunt’ was ‘profoundly offensive and appallingly tasteless.” I was summoned to the Head’s office to explain myself. She was in no mood for taking prisoners. As you can imagine, I have had a number of run-ins with the stupidity and insolence of office, ;) so she was going to make the most of her opportunity. The wonderful thing was however (which I knew when I chose Swift), that she immediately became far less sure of herself when I pointed out that the idea was Swift’s and that the work was considered one of the finest pieces of irony in the English language. It was also a set text at the time, so she was going to look rather stupid chastising me for bringing one of her own students’ set texts to life.

:) lol. This really is brilliant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

What I find appealing about Baudrillard is less anything he has to say about order of signs and more of what he suggests about this utterly impoverished and crass culture in which I find myself like some confused child plunged into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape.

hmm... you know, I feel that to survive in this world we have to have some contradictory values, some layer of hypocrisy. This sort of ties in with something you said before about ideology. A while ago, I made a pact with myself only to buy clothes that were made by companies that were signatories to the Homeworkers Code of Practice (the retailer basically agrees that their clothes have been made under good conditions, no exploited outworkers and so on). I wouldn't mind only shopping at the shops which had agreed to this, but the agreement only holds for clothes made in Australia. Now, for those of you who have never shopped in Australia, probably about 99.9% of clothing sold here is made in China, or overseas (clothes made in Australia are very much few and far between. Even Australian souvenirs are typically made in China) Anyway, I didn't buy clothes for about a month, because the realisation dawned on me, that on the off chance I find something that I like, that is affordable, and that fits, it almost certainly won't be made in Australia. So in the end I gave up. It's interesting because I've seen documentaries about how people can change the whole sweatshop-clothing industry thing by no longer shopping at stores that use sweatshops. (One of things that actually caused me to do it) But, in a world where it seems as if they ALL do, the rhetoric of choice is just that - a rhetoric. And the documentaries, which admirably try to empower consumers, only mask the fact that our freedom is to a great extent curtailed. (we are given a choice, but all of the choices are black. we can choose different types of black). They mask the reality, or provide a mask for the absence of a basic reality (absence of freedom and the ability for the free market to correct for failures in the economy. Unless of course, we all stop buying clothes.). So. I'm basically left with values that, whilst I'd like for them to correspond with my behaviour, don't. (Maybe I COULD only buy clothes that were made under good conditions, but I feel like, for all the difference I'd make, it really isn't worth the hassle. Leaving one pissed off fayefaye and one rambling post about the horrors of shopping...)

Also, an echo of the way that ideologies enable some disagreeing voices, which unfortunately seem to have little real impact. *becoming increasingly cynical*
01-13-2006, 11:32 PM
Virgil

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Virgil, do you actually read my posts? When I say that ‘reality is constructed through language’, I try to justify what I’ve said by giving examples or offering an explanation of what some theorists have said. You say ‘reality is derived from language’, but simply say it and then repeat it without dealing with any of the points I raised since the last time you said it. The ‘reasoning’ you offer above begins with a false assumption, which then generates further unsubstantiated assertions. At no point do you dispense with the idea that the world is ‘out there’ and we name it. That’s not how things work. It’s far more complicated.

"Reality is constructed through language" versus "reality is derived from language." There is no distinction that I can see between those phrases. Of course I know that postmoderns as well as Plato believe that a real world exists. But postmoderns believe that language is the reality.

Quote:

What do you mean ‘suspect’? Do you mean not the right one according to you? Are you saying that texts are not free to be re-interpreted?

This is a key point to which I aiming for in my upcoming post. Of course they can be re-interpreted. But postmoderns believe that the test itself is unstable and in flux.

Quote:

In this case, it is so in a much more conventional sense of the meaning of ideology – Capitalism.

Of course I'm completely aware. I'm actually agreeing with you for that case. I'm saying that to a postmodernist, it is no different whether you are talking about the sun rising or an exchange of capital. To a postmodernist, there is no distinction, it is all ideology, which I find rediculous.

Quote:

This is how I see it: At some point in human history, the condition of slavery came into being. However, perhaps at first the ruling ideology saw nothing ‘wrong’ with treating certain people as slaves. They might not have seen them as ‘slaves’ at all (or even as 'people' for that matter). Perhaps the ruling group genuinely believed that such a system was natural and common sense. It’s even possible that they called them slaves but they cannot have applied that word in anything like the sense that we mean it now. So the condition of slavery is in place and then discourses (and I think in the context of language as power, it is better to speak of ‘discourses’) compete for ways of determining what it ‘means’.

What you are describing here is not postmodernism: logos in your interpretation quoted is not in the signifyer.

Quote:

Firstly, if Literature is so enlightening and ennobling, why has it failed so miserably in the case of humanity?

I never said it could. I'm the one arguing that language doesn't control, remember?

Quote:

Secondly, not all feminists would agree that pornography degrades women. Camille Paglia has a very different view.

Paglia is the only one I know who purports this; she's a lone, anomolous voice on this; it's relatively recent and it doesn't explain the fifty years of feminist preaching.

Quote:

Theory doesn’t claim that watching ‘The Sopranos’ makes us want to join the mafia! It suggests rather that our perceptions of what the mafia is and our assumptions about IAs are dependent on the way things are represented in the relevant available sign systems.

You're very flexible with your theory. When it comes to shaping women's personalities you claim all sorts of subtle connotations of language (which I've claim are trivial) has determined their being: passive, feminine, etc. Read your posts in this whole thread. You, watching the show, doesn't want to make you join the mafia because you're not Italian. I've have know IA who had nothing to do with the mafia, but within the context of a particular discussion had wished that they were.

Quote:

If those systems repeatedly reinforce the idea that all IAs are gangsters, it’s hardly surprising that so many people assume that it’s true.

Well, you don't live in the United States. I believe there was a study of this. The reality turned out to be less than 1%, but the perception of the general population was in the 30ish percent range.
01-13-2006, 11:58 PM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

In such a world, the old-fashioned concern for social justice and the abolition of class-based society becomes outmoded. In the society of the spectacle, the new revolutionary must seek two things: “consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness.” In other words, we must try to discover our own sources of pleasure, independent of the needs that are imposed on us by the system, and we must try to wake up from the nightmare of “the spectacle.” Like Neo, we must choose the red pill. In other words, when it comes to rebellion and political activism, there is no point trying to change little details in the system. What does it matter who is rich and who is poor? Or who has the right to vote and who doesn’t? Or who has access to jobs and opportunities? These are all just ephemera, illusions. If commodities are just images, who cares if some people have more of them, others less? What we need to do is recognize that the entire culture, the entire society, is a waking dream – one we must reject in its entirety.

That was interesting, but I get the feeling that the person who wrote it is already pretty out of touch with reality (or at least, my understanding of it :p) How can somebody say something like, 'what does it matter who is rich and who is poor?' unless they have never been poor themselves. For those who have nothing, or next to nothing, and wonder how they're going to survive, having money is pretty damn important. And those denied the status of human beings by the legal system, denied a voice and a right to vote, would probably think that having these rights is really important. Who cares if voting doesn't make a difference, the fact that they weren't allowed to do it had an impact on the way they saw themselves. Imagine being told that you weren't a person.

Commodities... food, water, basic human rights... these things are real. Maybe the argument holds for the middle/upper clases, maybe I just haven't fully understood it.

I think in some ways, some of the other things they wrote ring true. People live in a world where they think a Mercedes is success, that a big, new house, a white picket fence and a four wheel drive, a couch upholstered in Italian silk is a happy, successful life. (Throw in a marriage with kids and you 'have it all') A world where images and marketing intermingle with reality. "This isn't life. This is just STUFF! And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." (American Beauty)
01-14-2006, 01:42 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

"Reality is constructed through language" versus "reality is derived from language." There is no distinction that I can see between those phrases.

Then why are these two sentences (they aren’t phrases) not identical? Are ‘constructed’ and ‘derived’ synonyms? It seems to me that your position is that meaning (if it would be better to call it that rather than ‘reality’) resides within a text, and is not something constructed from outside of it. Reality is not reflected by language but produced by it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

But postmoderns believe that the test itself is unstable and in flux.

And we all know, of course that meanings are fixed and stable. That’s why misunderstanding never occurs and also why when Gertrude said that Hamlet is ‘fat’, she meant that he was chubby.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

I'm saying that to a postmodernist, it is no different whether you are talking about the sun rising or an exchange of capital. To a postmodernist, there is no distinction, it is all ideology, which I find rediculous.

On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

What you are describing here is not postmodernism: logos in your interpretation quoted is not in the signifyer.

What do you mean? Are you taking issue with my point about language or my understanding of postmodernism? I don’t care whether you call it postmodernism, theory, post-structuralism, deconstructionism or whatever (which doesn’t mean that I consider distinctions between them as non-existent). My point is that meaning is dependent upon something other than authorial intention. You still haven’t answered the question of how we know that someone is a slave if we have no word for it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Quote:
Firstly, if Literature is so enlightening and ennobling, why has it failed so miserably in the case of humanity?

I never said it could.

True, you didn’t. This is the Liberal Humanist position, which is as close to your own as any. Would you not agree?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

I'm the one arguing that language doesn't control, remember?

I can’t believe that we are still quibbling over the meaning of ‘control’! Look back at only my second post in this thread. I am very careful to state, “I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.” Nevertheless, I do consider that language is form of control. The way you see control (judging simply from your comment above) is as something that forces people to do or think something they don’t want to. That’s not what I mean when I say that language is a form of control. Our very sense of ourselves is only made possible by the language (verbal, visual, etc.) available to us. Given that that language pre-exists us, what sense we are able to make must necessarily be shaped by that language. In what way isn’t it a form of control? How can we express thoughts or ideas that exist outside of the realm of language? "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Paglia is the only one I know who purports this; she's a lone, anomolous voice on this; it's relatively recent and it doesn't explain the fifty years of feminist preaching.

Very revealing choice of word, Virgil. No, Paglia isn’t a lone, anomalous voice. Women interpret pornography in different ways, as do feminists and other theorists.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

You're very flexible with your theory. When it comes to shaping women's personalities you claim all sorts of subtle connotations of language (which I've claim are trivial) has determined their being: passive, feminine, etc. Read your posts in this whole thread.

I think you need to read them. I said absolutely nothing about women’s personalities per se. I said ‘they had been given personality characteristics’, which is not the same as what you imply above. You say that I am flexible with my theory. Perhaps it is rather that you are less than attentive in your reading of my theories?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

You, watching the show, doesn't want to make you join the mafia because you're not Italian. I've have know IA who had nothing to do with the mafia, but within the context of a particular discussion had wished that they were.
Quote:
If those systems repeatedly reinforce the idea that all IAs are gangsters, it’s hardly surprising that so many people assume that it’s true.

Well, you don't live in the United States. I believe there was a study of this. The reality turned out to be less than 1%, but the perception of the general population was in the 30ish percent range.

I simply don’t know what your point is with most of this. I made no claims to any knowledge of IA experience and only used the information you’d given me (apart from mentioning ‘The Sopranos’. I remember that someone tried to sue (?) over the show’s negative portrayal of IAs.). I didn’t need to offer any of my own information as I thought you’d made the points very effectively. I still think so.
In the study you refer to I am here assuming that you are saying that X% of the American population believe that 30% of Italian Americans are in some way associated with the mafia. I won’t quibble over the X% except to say that I assume it is a significantly high number to warrant consideration (if only 0.005% per cent of the American public believed that 70% of IAs were involved with the mafia, it probably wouldn’t matter much). This means that, for some reason, a huge number of Americans think that nearly a third of all IAs are in some way associated with the mafia. In reality, only 1% are so how do we account for this significant difference? The theorists you decry would argue that people’s realities are constructed through the systems of meaning available. These systems are made up of signs. These are not a reflection of reality but the producers of it. Those systems are also permeated with ideological assumptions as well as competing discourses, all vying for recognition of their own position. In the case of the example you give, when those questioned were asked about an IA, they presumably had a concept of what an IA is to which they could refer to offer an answer. Now, where has that concept come from? It can’t already have existed in their heads from the moment of birth, so where’s it from and of what is it comprised? Many theorists would answer ‘from all the references to IAs to which the person has been exposed.’ What are these likely to be? I presume that personal experience might play a part in some cases but for most, it will be television, films, magazines, advertising, books, music, the whole field of signifiers which has rendered up any idea of what an AI is. So for some it might include Mario Lanza, for others Al Capone and for yet others, Robert De Niro. The last example is also interesting in that we might also ask what do people think of when they think of Robert De Niro? Obviously there will be variation but many will also think of gangsters. Our culture is so saturated with images and representations that these come to shape our sense of what is normal, everyday reality. Isn’t that what the study you mention suggests? Even though the ‘actual’ reality of the %age is just 1, the reality as it is perceived by a significant proportion of the American public is 30%. To me that is wholly consistent with just about everything the theorists have said.
I’ve no doubt, however, that you have a more correct explanation.
01-14-2006, 02:24 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

*becoming increasingly cynical*

My work is complete. :brow:
01-14-2006, 02:27 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

How can somebody say something like, 'what does it matter who is rich and who is poor?' unless they have never been poor themselves. For those who have nothing, or next to nothing, and wonder how they're going to survive, having money is pretty damn important. And those denied the status of human beings by the legal system, denied a voice and a right to vote, would probably think that having these rights is really important. Who cares if voting doesn't make a difference, the fact that they weren't allowed to do it had an impact on the way they saw themselves. Imagine being told that you weren't a person.

Commodities... food, water, basic human rights... these things are real. Maybe the argument holds for the middle/upper clases, maybe I just haven't fully understood it.

I think in some ways, some of the other things they wrote ring true. People live in a world where they think a Mercedes is success, that a big, new house, a white picket fence and a four wheel drive, a couch upholstered in Italian silk is a happy, successful life. (Throw in a marriage with kids and you 'have it all') A world where images and marketing intermingle with reality. "This isn't life. This is just STUFF! And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." (American Beauty)

This was my first reaction on the rich poor thing too. It sounds callous to say what does it matter. In some ways you could say, well we're caught up in a specifically linguistic binary rich/poor equating automatically the former with good and happy, the latter with bad and unhappy. In practice, I should have thought, it should be pretty obvious to most of us that this doesn't always hold true.

But the reality of poverty at its most extreme makes relativism a nonsense. What does it matter if Southern Africans are being forced at gunpoint into tiny holes in order to mine one of the key components of our computer's circuit boards? All I know is that I wouldn't want to have to do it. But what can I do about it? I don't intend to answer this because I don't think there is an answer - yet, but it's worth talking about - with specific reference to this language debate.

Guy Debord as Situationist par excellence is one of those Parisians I was talking about earlier who went through the '68 uprising and saw it fail. Already a lot of their material had gone beyond Marxism proper and into a semi-artistic realm designed to create the kinds of disturbances to consciousness that Unnamable is talking about above. 'Under the stones, the earth' they would say to remind us of the frothing, unpredictable world existing just below the surface of our ephemeral civilisation. One of their ideas, which I love, is 'the walk home' - the idea of the period of time after the event, after the spectacle, after the thing that was supposed to have centrality. After that, it's all supposed to be over, but no, you've still got to get home. They liked it because it's marginalised, something not talked about and assumed to be devoid of content and highly resistant to commodification (though I did recently see 'under the stones the beach' used, with no clearly intelligible reason, as a coca-cola ad).

This concern with a marginalised blankness in place of the spectacle runs throughout the sixties and I would say, from my own experience it does have a power to effect fairly powerful changes in consciousness. Warhol films from the period subject me to a barrage of sly detournements of traditional film language, series of events with no clear purpose, unhinged people talking nonsense, not following the script, not providing either useful information or well constructed escapist entertainment. Repeatedly watching these I've come butting up with my own conservatism, thinking, no this is stupid, there's nothing here, only to find the tension breaking as I realise I'm having a special experience, something I'm grateful for precisely because it's denied me by the dominant culture. Seeing these was one of the things that led me into having psychoanalysis - the 'talking cure'.

In a sense, my little epiphanies in cinemas have been luxuries. What of our African miners? Something tells me they're not going to be having screenings of 'Chelsea Girls' after work round the campfire, let alone much exposure to that dominant culture I'm so contemptuous of. But what's keeping them there? The situationists, particularly after '68 when they discovered to their dismay that the proletariat didn't want the revolution they were proposing, would probably say 'false consciousness' - something constructed by language. In a globalised situation, that would mean, not their own consciousness, but the consumer consciousness in the first world where the problem is always one of wanting too much and being fixated on the idea that one doesn't have enough. The Vance Packard book, 'Hidden Persuaders' that I've alluded to before is relevant. Packard describes how, using the discoveries of Freud among others about consciousness and the unconscious, advertising people in the fifties and sixties worked out how to promote this consciousness in people, falsely instilling an idea of progress so that people would feel they had to update their possessions regularly, regardless of whether the old ones were still functional. I would say that this is still happening today.

But, uh oh, we need this kind of behaviour to drive the economy don't we? Well, that's what we're told all the time and people go around saying it without always understanding it very well. I don't mean to disagree with it - I don't feel qualified to. But that means I'm also not qualified to agree with it and the same can be said about a lot of the other people blandly accepting it around me. The last thirty odd years have been dominated by rightwing economics, coming to fruition in Reaganomics and Thatcherism, but already in evidence in the policies of Jimmy Carter. In this monetarist schema, the postwar advance of the welfare state and, by extension, the idea of community (pace Thatcher 'There's no such thing as society') is seen as erroneous. 'Economic growth' is the objective and, hey, who could object? Well, according to Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, the period between 1973 and 1993 was a period of growth, but it was also the first sustained period in American history in which the standard of living for middle income Americans fell. Economic growth simply means the average earnings of the entire populace and it could only be said to have happened during this period because the rich got exponentially richer. Everybody else simply didn't. To make matters worse, Friedman shows a pattern of history whereby, as conditions worsen, ordinary people become more reactionary and therefore more likely to elect precisely the kinds of people who institute economic measures that harm them.

No accident that one of the first things to come under threat when money is tight is education and easy to see how this perpetuates a downward spiral. This is directly about language, control of and through language. Rightwing economics are riddled with shibboleths and millennarianism, constantly underlining the message that there is no alternative (TINA, as one current philosopher usefully shortens it). This rhetoric creates a reality, the system we live under, full of people repeating its truisms. But under the stones of rightwing economic rhetoric, the infinitely more complex reality.

Uh oh, that word again: reality. This is one signifier that, as I've already pointed out, is slipping about all over the place here. Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it? Is there any reality at all? Is it the same as 'the real'? Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality? Perhaps it's safest to say that the word can mean different things.
01-14-2006, 02:33 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

That was interesting, but I get the feeling that the person who wrote it is already pretty out of touch with reality (or at least, my understanding of it :p) How can somebody say something like, 'what does it matter who is rich and who is poor?' unless they have never been poor themselves. For those who have nothing, or next to nothing, and wonder how they're going to survive, having money is pretty damn important. And those denied the status of human beings by the legal system, denied a voice and a right to vote, would probably think that having these rights is really important. Who cares if voting doesn't make a difference, the fact that they weren't allowed to do it had an impact on the way they saw themselves. Imagine being told that you weren't a person.

Commodities... food, water, basic human rights... these things are real. Maybe the argument holds for the middle/upper clases, maybe I just haven't fully understood it.

I think in some ways, some of the other things they wrote ring true. People live in a world where they think a Mercedes is success, that a big, new house, a white picket fence and a four wheel drive, a couch upholstered in Italian silk is a happy, successful life. (Throw in a marriage with kids and you 'have it all') A world where images and marketing intermingle with reality. "This isn't life. This is just STUFF! And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." (American Beauty)

Although I would take issue with the writers over a number of comments, to be fair to them, I don’t think they are suggesting that the actual experiences of poverty etc. are unimportant but more that dealing with the issue of ‘poverty’ is unimportant. It is simply a ‘spectacle’ i.e. a debate that exists only for the purpose of convincing us that we are having a debate, which of course, we aren’t. All it really does is ensure the continuance of the existing power. If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads. It also allows us to engage in our favourite activity of being comfortable (which means not thinking too much):

“But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty--
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty--”

Milton Samson Agonistes

Of course those things you mention matter to most people but the extract suggests that if we are really serious about making improvements, we must begin by realising that we need to expose the whole system for what it is. I think you realised much of this yourself when you wrote about the Homeworkers Code of Practice. You can’t put out a forest fire with a water pistol, however good it feels to know you are doing your bit. I prefer to fan the flames. ;) You appear to like Twain – here’s one that comes to mind, “There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.”

There are larger implications but I don’t know if I can articulate them without inviting a backlash of Homeric proportions, so I’ll just say:

“nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts.”

“I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...”
01-14-2006, 02:41 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads.

The business of ethical consumer choices - though I do make them where possible - particularly backs up the current economic system: markets provide us with 'choice', they are 'rational' and self governing and self correcting. In other words, you don't need to apply international law to prevent goods being made in sweatshop conditions, the consumer market will take care of it by 'choosing' not to purchase the products. Aside from everything else, this makes it seem as if the whole thing's our fault, when actually we're largely powerless. And again, just to keep us on topic, this is done with language.
01-14-2006, 08:35 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Uh oh, that word again: reality. This is one signifier that, as I've already pointed out, is slipping about all over the place here. Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it?
Is there any reality at all? Is it the same as 'the real'?

Are you having a rhetorical flush or are these to be considered? It’s just that I don’t like that opposition between “constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control”. It might make some (I’ll mention no names) think, once again, that Language is an autonomous force deciding on the world of humans. I can see what you mean – is it that the only world we know is a construct of language or is there a world beneath the surface of language, which language works to hide from us?

I wonder if the analogy of building a house might help me to explain how I see the relationship between language and power (in the context of the thread).

Imagine that someone sufficiently knowledgeable about bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing etc. is given all the materials necessary to build a house and told to make it however they like. It might appear that they were free to construct any type of house they wished. However, let’s simply assume for a moment that all the bricks made available are blue and triangular. The resulting construction will already take on certain characteristics merely by virtue of the nature of the materials. That is one way a form of control occurs. We can only operate within the constraints, even though it might not feel as if there are any.

If we expand the analogy a little, we can see how other aspects we have discussed in this thread might work. If no one manufactures any other type of bricks, or we are educated to accept that, scientifically speaking, triangular bricks are by far the best, then our choices in real terms diminish further. The D.I.Y. expert himself or herself will already have assumptions about what is and isn’t possible by virtue of having acquired his or her knowledge from the existing pool. This further influences the nature of the resulting house.

A lot of these things will be determined by dominant discourses. The capitalist discourse might offer its own explanation of why no other kinds of bricks are manufactured. The ‘actual’ reasons would probably be economic (they’re cheaper) but the ones we would hear would hide this fact. This is the Marxist view. Capitalist discourse might also call on the legitimising power of other discourses (mechanical engineering concepts might be recruited to prove that bricks have to be triangular because of the coefficient of whatever). The D.I.Y. expert’s own knowledge will have been affected by discourses. The carpentry classes he or she attended were provided by an organisation/institution that had its own ideas about what skills and knowledge constitute Carpentry.

Obviously most of these things won’t be considered by the D.I.Y. enthusiast. It will ‘feel’ as though there is a choice. There is no group of conspirators wickedly employing language to force the D.I.Y. enthusiast to build the house that suits them. He or she is, however, being controlled through language.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality?

Both and neither. "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned."

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Perhaps it's safest to say that the word can mean different things.

Or different nothings. :D
01-14-2006, 11:15 PM
Virgil

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Then why are these two sentences (they aren’t phrases) not identical? Are ‘constructed’ and ‘derived’ synonyms? It seems to me that your position is that meaning (if it would be better to call it that rather than ‘reality’) resides within a text, and is not something constructed from outside of it. Reality is not reflected by language but produced by it.

I still don't get it. Yes they are synonymous. The distinction between these two in this context is infintesmal.

Quote:

And we all know, of course that meanings are fixed and stable. That’s why misunderstanding never occurs and also why when Gertrude said that Hamlet is ‘fat’, she meant that he was chubby.

What you have here, doesn't follow. Is it not possible that meanings can be fixed and misunderstandings still occur? The writer could have been imprecise; the reader could have mis read.

Quote:

On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

This is one of the central disagreements between us. I still haven't gotten a credible answer on The sun rose today. You all made fun of it as having a metaphor, but no one has still proven how that is ideological.

Quote:

You still haven’t answered the question of how we know that someone is a slave if we have no word for it.

The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

Quote:

True, you didn’t. This is the Liberal Humanist position, which is as close to your own as any. Would you not agree?

I don't know. I am sympathetic to Liberal humanism, and yes it is close to my position. But I'm not aware that this would be a tenet of Lib-Hum. Yes, I would agree that preaching morals is critical to society. But I would compare it to a magician doing a card trick whereby he sticks out the card he wants you to pick. Ultimately you don't have to pick it. I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

Quote:

On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

Well, then you need to clarify. To a postmodernist, as I understand it, there is no distinction, it is all ideology, which I still find rediculous. I asked where in Aristotle's Poetics is he ideological. Perhaps that's going to far across time and culture and translation of language to pick up the distinctions. Let's instead use Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Show me where he's ideological.

Quote:

I can’t believe that we are still quibbling over the meaning of ‘control’! Look back at only my second post in this thread. I am very careful to state, “I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.” Nevertheless, I do consider that language is form of control.

What you are arguing in that thread is the act of rhetorical argumentation. Don't you have your students write essays of pursuasion? This is pursuasion, not language as control.

Quote:

Our very sense of ourselves is only made possible by the language (verbal, visual, etc.) available to us. Given that that language pre-exists us, what sense we are able to make must necessarily be shaped by that language.

I dispute this. You have been brought up (let us assume it if you haven't) and I have been brought up with the same (albeit english english and american english) english language. How come we are so different? I said it before, how come my brother and I are so different? Where is the proof?

Quote:

I think you need to read them. I said absolutely nothing about women’s personalities per se. I said ‘they had been given personality characteristics’, which is not the same as what you imply above.

Perhaps I'm a little thick. What is the distinction?

Quote:

Very revealing choice of word, Virgil. No, Paglia isn’t a lone, anomalous voice. Women interpret pornography in different ways, as do feminists and other theorists.

I use the word, preaching, in a good way. I agree with the feminists here. In a paragraph above I say why preaching is important. I'm not using the word dispargingly. Paglia is the only one I've heard on this; if there are others, and I haven't heard of them, well, I'm pretty sure the average girl who goes into porn hasn't heard from them either. And so my point still stands: despite preaching from the left and the right, the porn industry has mushroomed once physical contraints were lifted.

As to the mafia issue, I agree there are many factors for becoming part of it, but you would think that with all the bombardment of cultural texts and images, that more than 1 percent of IA would join it.
01-15-2006, 09:12 AM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it?

Well, to throw in my two cents, I would say that language constructs reality, and because it constructs our view of reality, we could also say that it obstructs any objective reality which could be said to exist. (ie, we wouldn't have a clue what was real because we can't tell the difference between the reality and the construct) So both

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Is there any reality at all?

If there was, how could I prove it to you?

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Is it the same as 'the real'?

Far as I can tell, the Real is a state of fullness, where we can't differentiate between ourselves and our mothers and seem to have little idea about the world around us, and no ability to think abstractly (since we have no language). I don't consider that reality.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality?

Knowing nothing about Situationists and being too tired/lazy to look it up, I wouldn't have a clue. I would, however, be happy to hear more about the Situationists if anyone was willing to oblige :brow:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unnamable

I don’t think they are suggesting that the actual experiences of poverty etc. are unimportant but more that dealing with the issue of ‘poverty’ is unimportant. It is simply a ‘spectacle’ i.e. a debate that exists only for the purpose of convincing us that we are having a debate, which of course, we aren’t. All it really does is ensure the continuance of the existing power. If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads. It also allows us to engage in our favourite activity of being comfortable (which means not thinking too much)

I wouldn't really argue with that. I might even subscribe to it as a philosophy. But I can't help but be reminded of Sisyphus and that big, stupid rock and wonder what would happen if people really DID stop discussing/trying to deal with poverty. I'd like to think that it does make a difference, and that even if it doesn't improve things, the situation would deteriorate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

But this is a concept formed by the word 'slave'. Without 'slave', it's just another person doing work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

This is pursuasion, not language as control.

Language constructs the way we see the world, our sense of reality, our sense of self, the very way in which we think is constructed through language. How is that not control?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

Persuasion as to which option to choose is a means of control, isn't it? And the fact our options are constructed, isn't that also a type of control? I don't think control needs to suggest predeterminism.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

How come we are so different? I said it before, how come my brother and I are so different? Where is the proof?

I think you're misunderstanding what we mean by language constructs identity. Read earlier posts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

I agree with the feminists here

I'm going to split hairs and tell you there are lots of different types of feminists and you generally can't lump them all together like that.

Virgil, sorry if I've misunderstood any your post/repeated things already written, to be honest I've skipped over your recent posts (nothing personal)
01-15-2006, 09:44 AM
Virgil

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

But this is a concept formed by the word 'slave'. Without 'slave', it's just another person doing work.
What you are arguing here Faye is Platonic metaphysics: form preceeds reality. If that's the way you think it works, then fine. Postmodernism requires that meaning reside in the signifyer. The word had to precced all, even form which I don't find credible. The more you guys point things out, the more I'm beggining to believe that Postmodernism is nothing more than a variation of Plato's metaphysics.

Quote:

Language constructs the way we see the world, our sense of reality, our sense of self, the very way in which we think is constructed through language. How is that not control?

Prove it. Even Freud had to provide/fabricate studies. This is a grand statement of human nature, one that is I would say is somewhat revolutionary. This is probably overthrowing thousands of years of western culture, or at least since the enlightenment. You and those arguing here have an obligation to prove it. Otherwise I am beggining to believe is that this is fallacy of argument by assertion. I can think a large number of examples to contradict. I gave three above. I have yet to hear of one that supports it. Someone provide me proof.
01-15-2006, 09:50 AM
fayefaye

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

And so my point still stands: despite preaching from the left and the right, the porn industry has mushroomed once physical contraints were lifted.

I caved and found this on Situationism from Wikipedia:
The Spectacular society: "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."- Larry Law, from Images And Everyday Life, a 'Spectacular Times' pocket book.

What's interesting about this is a conversation I had with a psych major a while ago about pornography. People have done psychological studies showing that there is some sort of inverse relationship between how much porn somebody watches and how good they are in bed. (Yes, seriously) As it turns out, watching pornography offers this presentation of sex which it's often difficult for real life to stack up to in comparison. So guys become sort of... inured to it. It becomes harder and harder to turn them on; some become impotent.

What I'm suggesting, is the ever growing porn industry is because the presentation, the construction, the spectacle offers a fantasy which is almost *searching for the right words*... better than the reality. (Real sex isn't like porn, generally) Anyway, it ties in well with everything we've been talking about. Not only do people confuse the image with the real, but some actually start to prefer the image over the real. If guys get off to porn more than they actually have sex, it could be said that pornography becomes like a replacement for the reality. (It masks the absence of a reality also- they're not getting any!)
01-15-2006, 09:51 AM
fayefaye

(lol, I'm just pulling ideas out of my *** here, but I really think I'm onto something!)
01-15-2006, 10:16 AM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

The writer could have been imprecise; the reader could have mis read.

I know which one my money is on. :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

That’s interesting. It doesn’t sound like a female Roman slave. Why did you assume the kind of slave you did? The word must have different meanings for us. :) You are not thinking about this. What you see when you look might be what you describe if we look at it from the perspective of now. But what if I were a Roman senator looking at the same scene? I might not even consider the creature to be a man in the same why I am. That doesn’t mean he’s not or that he doesn’t exist until we think up a word. And what can you possibly mean by ‘no word is needed’ – as if some things are so obvious that we don’t even need a word for them. Well, name me just one thing that exists for which we don’t even need a word. ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

I would agree that preaching morals is critical to society.

Whose morals, Virgil and whose society?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

But I would compare it to a magician doing a card trick whereby he sticks out the card he wants you to pick. Ultimately you don't have to pick it. I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

First of all, I said nothing about predeterminism. That’s how you see it. I believe we enter a pre-existing realm that necessarily affects how we construct ourselves. That is not the same as saying that everything is already decided forever. That realm isn’t static. Competing discourses are adding to, subtracting from, re-emphasising or redefining it every day. If the ruling hegemony changes sufficiently, then the realm of language changes, as does the nature of the available roles. A simple example of this would be women employed in jobs that they would not have been employed in before.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

Show me where he's ideological.

I love that. It’s as if the ideological can be pinned down to a particular metaphor. You might just as well hand someone a copy of King Lear and say, “Show me where he’s great.”

This is ideological:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.”
Wordsworth from Preface to Lyrical Ballads

I could have copied the whole of it because it is an outline of Wordsworth's own ideology with regards to Poetry and its importance. Surely even Wordsworth’s desire for change is a revolutionary ideology?

On many English Literature undergraduate courses, the significant names before the Romantics are the 18th century novelists like Richardson and Fielding and poets like Dryden and Pope. These writers would not have shared Wordsworth’s sense of the importance of ‘felt experience’ and it is out of the supposed cold rationality of that age that the Romantic Poets were born.

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth is explicitly concerning himself with the question of what Poetry is. It’s not simply a technical mode of writing; it’s bound up with social, political and philosophical implications. Most of the Romantic Poets were political activists – easy to notice in the work of Blake and Shelley. To the Romantics, the whole realm of the ‘Imagination’ carries a political force. They hope their ideas will transform society. The emphasis is on the transformative power of the imagination, with the human subject located at the centre of this world. How can you not see that all this is an ideological position, even in your sense of the term? It’s part of the Romantic ideology. Or is Romanticism not an ideology, merely a way of categorising artists? Artists exist only in a social and historical context; they don’t float around in the ether.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

How come we are so different?

This is relative. We are not as different as say a carrot and a monkey. (We do, though, share 35% of our genes with a daffodil.) And we are certainly more similar than either of us and a member of the Sarawak tribe. We are at least similar enough to have both arrived at and decided to post on the same website.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Virgil

As to the mafia issue, I agree there are many factors for becoming part of it, but you would think that with all the bombardment of cultural texts and images, that more than 1 percent of IA would join it.

I’m not arguing about becoming a part of it – that is not what’s interesting about the study! I’m interested in why people’s perceptions differ. The cultural texts and images that bombard us are not recruiting for the mafia! I didn’t realise that your argument was that language can’t be controlling us otherwise more people would join the mafia and if this argument goes on much longer, I think I’ll submit an application form myself. The all-pervasive, all-encompassing texts of a modern media society are not reinforcing the idea that people should join the mafia (has it not struck you as significant that in almost 100% of mainstream films, we are finally reminded that crime doesn’t pay, that killing is wrong, or that everything will turn out well in the end?). The important point is that these images/texts etc. contain representations that end up as a part of our own sense of reality. That explains the 30% figure.
01-15-2006, 10:49 AM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

I wouldn't really argue with that. I might even subscribe to it as a philosophy. But I can't help but be reminded of Sisyphus and that big, stupid rock and wonder what would happen if people really DID stop discussing/trying to deal with poverty.

By dropping the issue, I don’t mean simply wash their hands and forget about it, but have done with all the present nonsense (i.e. the discursive practices with which the problem is currently addressed) and begin by seeing what the real problem is.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

I'd like to think that it does make a difference, and that even if it doesn't improve things, the situation would deteriorate.

We would all like to think that – it stops us from just sitting down on the side of the road and simply refusing to take part any more. But our belief, despite the evidence, is vital to the continuance of the present system.

PS – Don’t forget that Camus concluded, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” :lol:
01-15-2006, 11:46 AM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

The Spectacular society: "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."- Larry Law, from Images And Everyday Life, a 'Spectacular Times' pocket book.

The idea isn’t that dissimilar to Freud or even Lacan in its idea of substitutes. It also reminds me of Freud's idea of fetishism and the idea of commodity fetishism.
“The motive of human society is in the last an economic one.” Freud, not Marx, said that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

how good they are in bed. (Yes, seriously)

I think you’ve made this up to test us. How do you measure something like that? Are there judges sitting near, awarding marks for style, levels of technical difficulty, artistic interpretation? I don't know, you Aussies. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

As it turns out, watching pornography offers this presentation of sex which it's often difficult for real life to stack up to in comparison. So guys become sort of... inured to it. It becomes harder and harder to turn them on; some become impotent.

You could also say that watching action movies or soaps, or advertisements or whatever “offers presentations of XXX which it’s often difficult for life….in comparison.”

We become inured to everything: “When I hear about deprivation and injustice in the world, I get up and change the channel.” Garrison Keillor 95 Theses 95 from Lake Wobegon Days

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

If guys get off to porn more than they actually have sex, it could be said that pornography becomes like a replacement for the reality. (It masks the absence of a reality also- they're not getting any!)

I hope this isn’t directed at me. :)

To be serious (and perhaps to highlight the extent to which thinking away from the current dominant discourses is extremely difficult, if not impossible,), look at the assumption in your own comment. You assume that actual sex is ‘reality’ and pornography is simulation. In other words, by associating pornography with those things that you angrily point out are replacing ‘real’ experience, you are assuming ‘real’ experience is superior. Will you now call on the power of biological discourse to justify your choice? :D

I agree that it is all consistent with the theories we have been discussing here. I know Virgil mentioned pornography and that is why you mentioned it, but it might be worth considering why pornography is more emotive a topic than most of the other topics we could have chosen. Why should we object more to being bombarded with pornography than to being bomborded with, say, all forms of advertising?
01-15-2006, 12:17 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Are you having a rhetorical flush or are these to be considered?

Gah. It ended up sounding like a rhetorical flush - a bad one - but what I was trying to say is that throughout this discussion you veer between different uses of the words 'real' and 'reality'.

Leaving aside the fact that 'the real' has a somewhat more specific connotation in Lacanian discourse, it sometimes seems that you're saying language is the reality and sometimes that there is another real reality beyond the dominant discourses' constructions of reality. I assume you'll balk at the latter and I'm sorry, there's so much to wade through that I don't think I can go back and find specific quotes, but I don't think I've imagined it. I also think it's absolutely basic to this kind of discussion that this happens. No matter how much one rationally understands the impossibility of absolutism, one keeps coming back to it unconsciously. There's also something seriously queasy about the sense that poststructuralists are saying 'language is the reality'. Everything is not true and everything is true (and, pace Hassan El Sabbad, 'Everything is permitted). Why should we address the dominant discourses at all critically if this is the case? Specifically, in doing so, aren't we saying, 'what you have constructed does not fit reality' - some 'fundamental' reality that should underpin or undermine the reality of what we build on it? To extend your house analogy, the point might be that no matter what we're allowed to build and with whatever bricks, the ground was unstable and the building's eventually going to collapse into itself and this basic, inarguable truth is denied and marginalised at every stage of the building process. But within poststructural thought, it seems that there is no possibility of such a basic truth.

If this is the case, I don't really have a big problem with it. I was mainly just trying to point out that the assumption of a fundamental reality does seem to keep coming back.
01-15-2006, 12:31 PM
blp

Quote:

Originally Posted by fayefaye

Well, to throw in my two cents, I would say that language constructs reality, and because it constructs our view of reality, we could also say that it obstructs any objective reality which could be said to exist. (ie, we wouldn't have a clue what was real because we can't tell the difference between the reality and the construct) So both

This is my point. Can that objective reality be said to exist at all?

Here's what I think: there's always more. Contrary to what Marx and Hegel and, later, Fukuyama have thought, there's never going to be an ultimate synthesis, which is to say, the dialectic, the debate is never going to end. It's not even as linear as the dialectical process suggests. One solution doesn't just become an opposition in another debate, it implies many many more possibilities than it is intended to. The main problem with the dominant discourses is not necessarily what they are saying in itself, it's their dominance, their assertion of centrality and the absolute absence not of an alternative (if you don't like the democrats, vote republican), but of many many alternatives.

These dominant discourses do create reality - objective reality - however ephemeral. They create facts on the ground if you like - free health care gets cut, people die. It's true, it happens, it's reality, brought about by a process of argument and assertion. But there is a reality that is denied in this, which is not so much 'If you hadn't cut free helath care, those people wouldn't have died' - a difficult case to make - as 'There are many many other ways of looking at this problem'.
01-15-2006, 01:37 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Gah. It ended up sounding like a rhetorical flush - a bad one - but what I was trying to say is that throughout this discussion you veer between different uses of the words 'real' and 'reality'.

One of us is / Both of us are confusing my own position with the ones I have tried to explain. I have said a few times that I don’t ultimately subscribe to these theories. Ultimately, I don’t believe that there is nothing other than text. I say ‘believe’ rather than ‘think’. It isn’t a rational position that I can defend easily but it’s largely what Literature is to me. The thing is, I don’t think it matters greatly for a lot of what we’ve been discussing. Whether or not there is anything beneath the surface will never be known until we first realise that it is just a surface.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Leaving aside the fact that 'the real' has a somewhat more specific connotation in Lacanian discourse, it sometimes seems that you're saying language is the reality and sometimes that there is another real reality beyond the dominant discourses' constructions of reality. I assume you'll balk at the latter and I'm sorry, there's so much to wade through that I don't think I can go back and find specific quotes, but I don't think I've imagined it. I also think it's absolutely basic to this kind of discussion that this happens. No matter how much one rationally understands the impossibility of absolutism, one keeps coming back to it unconsciously. There's also something seriously queasy about the sense that poststructuralists are saying 'language is the reality'. Everything is not true and everything is true (and, pace Hassan El Sabbad, 'Everything is permitted).

Isn’t this the conclusion Ivan Karamazov reaches? It’s interesting that I should be reminded of this. Do you know the novel? Ivan is the tormented intellectual who doubts that there is any rational or moral order in the universe. For me, the best parts of that great novel are Ivan’s discussions with Alyosha in the chapters ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. If you haven’t read them, do: they really are worth it.

There is also a character called Smerdyakov, who is particularly interested in discussing philosophy with Ivan. He hears Ivan’s explanation of why ‘Everything is permitted’ and subsequently murders Fyodor Pavlovich. Ivan suffers terrible guilt over this, even though his rational mind tells him that he isn’t responsible. This is one of the reasons I prefer to read Literature in the way I do. I’ll never know what the ‘real truth’ is, so I concentrate on the way others battle with what it all means. I find Ivan fascinating.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Why should we address the dominant discourses at all critically if this is the case?

I’m not being facetious when I say, “because they are there.” We have to find something to give us the impression that we exist, eh Didi? I might never discover who I am or what the point of it all is but as much as possible I’d like the experiences I have to be only contaminated with the discourses I am prepared to defend. Most of all, I don’t want ignorance in authority to tell me what really matters, as if they know or care.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

Specifically, in doing so, aren't we saying, 'what you have constructed does not fit reality' - some 'fundamental' reality that should underpin or undermine the reality of what we build on it? To extend your house analogy, the point might be that no matter what we're allowed to build and with whatever bricks, the ground was unstable and the building's eventually going to collapse into itself and this basic, inarguable truth is denied and marginalised at every stage of the building process.

Yes, I agree – which is why I said that I’d encounter a backlash if I said what I meant. In the end, none of it does matter. Horrible though it might sound, even the worst acts of atrocity are ultimately insignificant. Of course, we don’t live in the ultimate.Do you remember that George Steiner quotation I posted? It’s relevant here:

“ The notion of cosmic solitude [is] …to a great majority among us, unbearable. We crave a witness, even fiercely judgemental, to our small dirt. In sickness, in psychological or material terror, when our children lie dead before our eyes, we cry out. That such a cry resounds in nothingness, that it is a perfectly natural, even therapeutic, reflex but nothing more, is almost impossible to endure.”

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

But within poststructural thought, it seems that there is no possibility of such a basic truth.

Yes, I can see why you would want this and I don’t think I’d object too much if it were achieved. The important thing for me, however, is to keep questioning and challenging the assumptions that are used to control us. You want it to reveal the possibility of something better. I want it first to expose what’s wrong.
01-15-2006, 09:46 PM
The Unnamable

Quote:

Originally Posted by blp

it sometimes seems that you're saying language is the reality and sometimes that there is another real reality beyond the dominant discourses' constructions of reality.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73...tion_1933_.jpg

This Magritte painting is called ‘The Human Condition’. You’ve probably seen it many times. I can remember first seeing it when I was about 19. My reaction to it then hasn’t changed much in the subsequent years. The immediate question I asked was about the part of ‘reality’ blotted out by the canvas and easel. How do we know whether it’s the same as what is painted on the canvas within the canvas? That should alert us to the kinds of problems we’ve encountered using the term ‘reality’ here. The whole thing is a canvas, obviously. So what I called the ‘reality’ obscured by the painted canvas and easel is itself a painted representation of reality. At some point I must have realised that there is no way that we would ever be able to find out whether what’s hidden by the canvas corresponds to what appears on the canvas. Therefore, I decided, it doesn’t matter. All I have to deal with is what I perceive to be there.
01-16-2006, 06:20 PM
Xamonas Chegwe

I love Magritte. He always reminds me of Philip K Dick's short stories - not the best technician by a long margin - but some of the best ideas out there.

Ceci n'est pas un post!
01-16-2006, 08:39 PM
blp

Unnamable, just to be clear - and as may be clearer from my last post, which you may have missed - a lot of what you were responding to was not my view so much as an attempt to unpick what seemed to me to be some contradictions in what was being said throughout this thread. In the end, and here's a rhetorical flourish I'll stand by, I keep coming back to Eliot's line from Sweeney Agonistes: 'But I gotta use words when I talk to you'. And because the words keep slipping around, it can become increasingly difficult to work out whether we're agreeing. Still, I think we are on the whole, particularly on the slipperiness itself.

But here's something I'll take issue with - at least with my interpretation of it - 'none of it does matter'. It does - in the same way the individual signifiers do - not absolutely and transcendentally, but in little localised relational contexts. I credit that 'Grand Inquisitor' passage with saving what could have been years of wasted time in a friend of mine's life. I'd just read it many years ago when he told me he was thinking of joining a religious group in the north of England. I gave him my interpretation of the text and used it to explain far better than I could have myself why what he was planning made no sense. He dropped the plan and went to university. Many years later, the religious group was revealed to have been a cult. Hope this doesn't sound like bragging - it weren't me it were Dostoyevsky. Incidentally, I've been meaning to tackle the rest of the book ever since and this is a timely reminder.

'There's more to life than books you know, but not much more' - The Smiths.

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