re: Ken Rufo

Ken Rufo's post on Baudrillard made me think...a lot. Mainly because it was so long I could barely concentrate. Not because of how it was written, but if something's in weblog form and is long, I struggle reading things on the net. But I got the jist of it. But I want to tahnk him for his post, because it made me interested in Baudrillard. So that's good.
What I thought about most was his explaination of the perception of money and how it is a simulacra because values of money don't represent anything about the companies or stocks or poeple it belongs to. (On a side note, I liked how Ken related simulacrum/simulacra to the rides at Disney World because it gave me a better understanding of what exactly they are). Money is a representation of something much larger than itself. It is a representaton, to most, of economic stance, social affluence and even has a large part to do with politics. Money is relateable to the hyperreal because of its representation in the stock market, because it determines how well a company is or isn't doing. The fact that money can be used in terms of credit cards is an example of this as well because the money is there but you never get to actually see the money (also the hyperreal). We know it is there but we can't see it.

Here it goes.

The readings by Faucault and Barthes really helped me do this post because what I took away as the main point of both was the discussion of the absence of the author and the author as a means of "discourse" for the text. Faucault discussed the author being the "handler" of the text and the psychological process of interpreting the text is the "handling" of the text. He also discusses "author functions" of texts, which refers to the author being more than just a narrator, but a facilitator of the process of interpretation for the reader. (If that makes any sense at all).
Barthes' Death of an Author also argues that the author is more than just a creater of the text, and there is an extremely complex way to interpret the text that we cannot understand. From reading this and discussing in class, I figured out that it is not the way we interpret a text, but how we take the cultural influences that influence the text and turned it into what it is to be interpreted. Basically, this class is so over my head it hurts but I think I might be getting the hang of it. I just wish someone would put it into lamens terms for me. :)
Anyhoo, I clicked on Professor Zero's blog and I was absolutely intregued by the idea of anonymity on the web. It relates to what we are discussing in class, because it is much harder to interpret someone over the web when they are anonymous and we know nothing about them. Furthermore, ideas of "false identity" are brought up. It's hard to relate to someone and know exactly where they are coming from if they falsely identify themselves or even lie. People's writing styles vary, as do their ideas and where these ideas come from, and they all relate to eachother. The subject of anonymity made me think a lot because how can Faucault and Barthes' pieces make any sense if they were written by anonymous bloggers. Hmm.

Derrida

Blogger really needs to be more aware that I may or may not remember my password every time I log in, and stop trying to block me from posting on my own blog. If someone were to hack into my blog, they couldn't possibly make me sound like even more of an idiot even if they tried, so let them hack it. Anyway.
I thought a lot more about what Derrida said about love and narcissism.
I actually had never heard the story of Echo and Narcissa before, so that was kind of a treat for me to figure out where the ideas of blind love and narcissism itself came from.
Love is really the most complicated and broad topic to be talked about. When we talk about love, are we speaking about who we love as a person vs. what we love about a person? Derrida says he cannot possibly chose because if you fall out of love with someone for their qualities you don't like, you must love the person for who they are, which is someone made up of those qualities. People aren't just beings, they have certain qualities about them that make them into the singular person that they are.
A Narcissist is someone who is self-absorbed and doesn't care about others aka My aunt Jane. That makes sense now. Narcissa was a Greek mythical figure who fell in love with his own reflection and actually died looking at it. However, he managed to find love in Echo, another mythical figure who could only repeat the ends of others phrases (so basically he fell in love with her for repeating what he said). I'd never heard this before, but now the words make sense I suppose. One goes through a "healthy" narcissistic phase as a tike, and if you get out of it, you move onto realizing that the entire world doesn't revolve around you.
The documentary taught me a lot on these things, and I don't know much about psychoanalytic theory except from the beginning psych classes I have taken here, but I feel like we're about to delve really deep into theory based on human nature. I didn't really take enough from the first class on it to blog about it, but I bet idea of subjects and Descartes and cartesian ethnics and enlightened philosophy will come into play next time. See yaaaa.

EXTRA CREDIT (because we all know I desperately need some)

Question: How does Derrida handle the interview process? Does he resist the interview process? Is there a disconnect between what the interviewer wants to know and what Derrida wants to say, i.e. between what Derrida thinks is important and what the interviewer thinks is important?


Jacques Derrida was kind of funny to watch on film. He absolutely resisted the interview process, openly and blatantly to the camera crew. While at times I thought he was being absolutely rude, I couldn't help but just laugh and think "he kind of reminds me of my grandfather" (whom I absolutely adore) so it kind of evened out.
Derrida kept mentioning how the cameras around him were unnatural, and how it didn't feel right to answer a lot of the questions to the camera which may or may not have been considered the "Other" throughout the interview process. There was one scene where he was watching himself watch himself on television, which I found funny because I feel if he saw that scene, he would have lost his mind trying to pull that apart piece by piece and talk about why it was so messed up and unnatural.
He made his own answers to his own questions... rather, he invented his own questions as opposed to even attempting to give a somewhat normal answer to a seemingly normal question coming from a "non-thinker" or "non-critic". He didn't like some of the questions the interviewer asked, which, to me, seemed like normal, regular interview questions. He and the interviewers had totally different ideas about which questions were normal or appropriate or necessary to be answered. He made his own questions from hers after putting her down for asking said forementioned question in the nicest way possible (while giggling). However, we are dealing with one of the greatest thinkers of the century, so he's bound to try to put people in their places more than a few times. (How his poor wife Marguerite deals with his vagueness and general opposition to question answering is totally beyond me.)
He said a lot in the interview that made me think... The interviewer asked him a question about love and he went off and did his Derrida thing and just totally turned the question around on her (standard Jacques). He said he couldn't possibly touch on love in general, because it was too big and important and had endless meanings. Though what he said when he asked if we love others for their singularity or qualities made me think. He determined that it is impossible to choose that we love someone for everything about them and their "singularity" because anti-love, or it's opposite, (the reason we stop loving people) is because of their specific qualities that we find unattractive. He said "love dies when we realize one doesn't merit out love not because of who they are but because of ____, ____ and ____."
I thought I would hate the movie, but some parts of it I found really interesting, and he made me laugh a lot with his old man antics. However, I heard him speaking English fluently. Perfectly, even. So why was the interviewer struggling to speak French when he probably speaks better English than anyone in this country??? Just a thought.
I'm going to attempt to do the midterm this weekend AKA I might die.