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reading all you geniuses, and I do not say that in jest but in great seriousness I am forced to take a step backward and having nothing of equal brilliance to say must grasp at something from another genius.
So I shall quote James Barrie, author of Peter Pan. He said to a fellow famous author who was touting his latest creation"that is all very well but can you wiggle your ears?" :brow:
Oh, please. It's a metaphor. It's disinterested. It's a statement of fact. Did the sun not rise by you today, or is that all relative to you?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
Oh, there's been a few others too who have contributed, not just three of us. Let's not forget them.Quote:
Originally Posted by rachel
Frankly this is nothing to be overly impressed about. It's what we've been exposed to in grad school. I frankly ususally question overly intellectulized explanations, especially when it comes to art and literature. For centuries, western culture based the foundations of its world view on the scholarly thinking of Plato and his Academy. After centuries, it dawned on people, what a crock! Well, I think we have a new academy today that seems to think outside of common sense. Sorry if that insults anyone. Perhaps its my engineering training that when confronted with abstraction I feel around for the tangible. If you've read my posts here, you can see that my feeling is that this is all a gordian knot of thinking.
Unnamable,
Perhaps I was not clear; I don't think you're telling that power is only excersed by the physical coercion. I was thinking about Virgil's statement, when he said "persuasion is not excercise of power. Words don't force people to do things they don't want to do". My answer aimed to exprime that power can persuade people and -in a complex process, that involves also interaction between attitudes, motivations and interests of people- make them see the world in a certain way -by means of press, for instance. And if we see world in a certain way, we will behave consequently. I believe that persuasion is excercise of power, even if the aims of it are positive or negative, being power a kind of relationship between groups. I think that examples you gave in the third reply ilustrates what I want to say.
When I wrote about people whose main care were the buying of very publicited products I didn't mean that they're stupid, I apologize if the message suggested that idea. But I had in my mind the image of young people, no necesarily teenagers, whose values and aspirations seem to be curiously limited. I think that some conditions, for example, a formal education of low quality, added to contexts socioeconomical and familiar disfavoured (not only economically) , make them more vulnerable. And those situations create conditions to the reproduction of exclusion, and contribute to mantain situations of dominance.
I agree with you in the fact we are all controlled in a subtle, unconscious manner. Eagleton also says that in superior education institutions we are enabled to speak and write in a specific way, no matter what we think or believe. The control is excersed over the discourse as a form. It seems that if we access to superior education, we are controlled in our discourse and become participants of an elite. If we don`t, we are excluded or limited in our access to discourse, but controlled at all.
BLP, as a human being I forgive you, but as psychologist, I don't. You know, Lacan's theory is a karma in my life. There are many aproachs more comprehensible and even Freud is more preferable. A teacher told me at once "at fist, I thought this was Gongora". She didn't liked Gongora, but I sincerely love him, and Lacan is not Gongora. Perhaps I should read him in French (To be quite sure). Your assertion, "Alright, there were a lot of individual words I kind of understood, but next to each other they were a problem" could be made for many psychologists I know.
(Unnamable, I have heard many times the assertion "Lacan inverts the Saussurian algorithm". I readed De Saussure and I couldn't find that De Saussure attributes preeminence to "signified" over "signifier". He says that both are the two inseparable faces of the lingüistic sign, but as far as I know, he doesn't emphasizes not any of them. I am beginner in Lingüistics, and my teacher at University -a lovely one- seems not to be much interested in Lacan. On the contrary, psychoanalists usually underlined that invertion, and in Theory and Critics it was underlined too. Is this actually a very important point?)
Well, I see you all been hardly working, I guess I have to read more to be worth of this thread. Perhaps I'll get courage to face Lacan.
Of course it did (I think). I was just pointing out the implicit assumptions and social conventions present in even the simplest of statements.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
And it was supposed to be a disinterested fact, not a metaphor. A metaphor is a step removed from a fact; a comparison that attempts to offer extra insight. Perhaps you should have chosen your example more carefully.
One plus one is two. That's a fact. About as disinterested as you can get. But it requires an understanding of numbers, of the operation of addition, of the meaning of equality to convey it's meaning. Bertrand Russell took several chapters of his Principia Mathematica to prove this statement!
Whether you like it or not, words and sentences carry baggage - that's a fact but not a disinterested one.
And that, oh wise one, is why I don’t ultimately care what any critics or theorists say about any of the writers I love. In the end it’s very simple for me and probably very narcissistic. Literature is whatever reminds me of the world as I have experienced it. What I find interesting are characters and situations, preferably interesting characters in interesting situations, which make me either laugh or think. You’re right; someone has to make the dinner. This is, of course another piece of ideology and certain structures of power will be further maintained as a result of my subscribing to it. Ah, well.Quote:
Originally Posted by rachel
We probably all need someone who can see the world as we can, to share our sense of its miraculous absurdity. My two favourite examples from the world of writing are:
“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you."” ~A.A. Milne
and
ESTRAGON:
We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
VLADIMIR:
(impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget. (He picks up a boot.) Come on, give me your foot. (Estragon raises his foot.) The other, hog! (Estragon raises the other foot.) Higher!
-Waiting for Godot
The challenges of the everyday are the ones that occupy us most. We need to get our boots on and we can’t even recognise the difference between left and right. Genius, indeed! I’m as confused, uncertain and pointless as everyone else.
"Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods upon this sombre theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposefully than he is. These black doubts creep up on a man just before thunderstorms, or at six in the morning when the steam begins to knock solemnly in the pipes, or during his confused wanderings in the forest beyond Euphoria after a long night of drinking.
The fearful mystery that lies behind all this endless rotation has led Man into curious indulgences and singular practices, among them love, poetry, intoxicants, religion, and philosophy. Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies, and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behaviour pattern."
James Thurber
What do you mean, ‘directed at’? It was ‘addressed to’ Virgil! Slippery things these signifiers, aren’t they? ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by fayefaye
Don’t worry; I’d assumed that. I’m feeling a little deconstructed at the moment and even when I was writing the question, I was wondering about whether or not I should agree that ultimately it is all BS. But then I’d have to issue disclaimers and we’d be back into endlessly deferred meaning. My words are deconstructing themselves before my very eyes! It’s all BS and the answer to my question is that we are waiting for Godot. It's either this or the tele. :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by fayefaye
“The sun shone, having no alternative on the nothing new.” Murphy SB
Unnamable,
Where do you get all of your quotations from? You seem to have something to respond to every argument and something long at that. I can't believe that you pull out the books and copy them in by hand - no spelling mistakes and you don't strike me as anally retentive enough to spend hours proof-reading; plus, your responses appear too quickly for it in any case - so do you have a favourite website full of amazing observations, or what?
I really love that "forest beyond Euphoria" metaphor. I've spent half my life there without knowing where it was!
Wasn't it Thurber that said, "A woman's place is in the wrong"? Sounds like your kind of guy based on the Herzog thread.
How dare you! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
I’m kwite good at spellings. I remember large chunks of a lot of them (simply because they are memorable) and the full versions are on my computer in various files. The observations on the texts are what struck me when I was reading them, I suppose. So no website, sorry. Occasionally, I use the texts online here and search the keywords I remember.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
Wonderful. That made me laugh out loud and is the kind of observation that you should keep in a file somewhere. I know I’m going to use it when you aren’t looking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
I couldn’t possibly agree with anything so utterly un-PC. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
As I live and work in Asia, I am in a very different time zone from you. So whose 'today' do you mean in this disinterested statement of fact?Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Wonderful. You have returned the compliment and made me laugh out loud.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Anna Seis,
Who is the woman in your avatar? Hopefully I will be able to understand the answer. ;)
And if it's yourself - well hello!!!!
Just a wild guess but isn't that Greta Garbo?
One quick google image search later - Of course it is! I never was any good at faces - or names for that matter - speak to me and I'll forget you by tomorrow. There are things that I am good at but they'd only get asterisked if I deigned to try and mention them.
Thanks for compensating for my gaps in knowledge.
I am in your debt Schez. btw - are those really your own wings?
Pardon, you said you are...?? :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
The wings are, of course, my own! I usually carry my halo in a hat box for the sake of convenience... as you can imagine!