Feminism!

When I thought about being a feminist, even just before I entered college, I always pictured feminists to be angry man-hating lesbians and/or butch-like women. I never really considered myself to be a feminist because though I am slightly angry, I do not classify myself as any of the preceeding. However, I soon changed my opinions about feminism upon learning more about it throughout my college career, as in high school, the topic was rarely touched upon. I learned that men can be feminists too because feminists simply believe in equal rights for women.... it just so happens they believe women are people too. Through reading feminist authors, I have found that feminists are still enraged today about the lack of equal rights of women. I have also learned .74cents to a $1 a man makes, which is absolutely ridiculous and I also learned that the ERA, or equal rights amendment, has not passed yet, and is still in the works. There are people who are opposed to women havingequal rights as men because of stupid things such as insurance purposes in the work place, making women feel inadequate and less important than their male colleagues.
While writing my paper on feminism in the film Mean Girls, I was picking apart the film and how each woman in the movie was dependant on a man of some form, whether it was a boyfriend or a paternal figure. The girls all wanted, desired and achieved boyfriends. Even the girl who was thought to be a lesbian the entire movie ended up with a boyfriend, disappointing female viewers and demeaning the independence of women.
Feminists are not all angry hairy bra-burning people, and after sitting and considering these facts, I have determined that I myself can be considered a feminist, and I am not ashamed to say so. I will continue to push for equal rights for women.

Lacan...Mantissa...Fowles...My head hurts

When considering the force of the death drive and jouissance as the orgasmic shattering of the self for which the death drive aims, you read Mantissa as a sexual book rather than about a signified, signifier type of reading. You don't see it as him being out of his head, you see it as the doctors taking extreme measure to get him to regain his memory. Maybe if that is how you view it, you can see it as them trying to get him totally to "shatter" his own self (that self which has a lack of memory) into becoming his old self (one which possesses his memories). According to Fowles, Our sexual identities are part of how we interpret our own identities and how we see ourselves as well as how others see us.
For Lacan, sexuality is antithetical to our identities and endangers how we see the self and how we behave. Hence, he takes literal meaning to the term orgasm meaning "little death"... the self is completely shattered and the sexual being takes over. Where identity prevails, the sexual takes over and becomes more prevalent, as shown in Fowles' novel Mantissa. Miles has no idea who he is yet he knew about his sexual identity (as when he recalls to the muse, "I don't know who I am but I know I wouldn't do such things [sexually]".) Therefore, these two authors have somewhat opposing ideas yet the main idea of a lack of identity leads to sexual prevailence is present. Lacan believes these two terms, identity and sexuality, to be contradictory which is also shown in Mantissa by Miles not recalling who he was until his sexuality came forth. Wait. If these two are opposing, it would be hard for them to go hand in hand as they did in Mantissa. How is one not directly related to the other if Miles could not regain consciousness until his sexual side was explored?
Mantissa confused me. But I'm still trying to get the hang of it. Ashley's post on Lacan did help me understand it a little more, but I still can't figure out if Fowles and Lacan are opposing views alltogether or if their sexuality theories go hand in hand somehow. Looks like I've got some q's for Dr. M. tomorrow.

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.

Marxist response to Dr. Craig

(Edit: This is my 6th attempt to post this entry since 8 am. hopefully this one stays up. I am furious with blogger.com as I've written this response out about 3 times now.

Dr. Craig's blog made me think a lot about how the "ruling class" tries to "brainwash" the middle and lower classes into thinking certain things and behaving in certain ways. Sure, it's easy to assume that upper classes have power because that's just the way things are or "it is what it is" but is the lower class' response to such autonomy their own fault?
There are people in the world with so much money they don't know what to do with it. So they store it in banks, and live off the interest for the rest of their lives and never do anything positive for the world with their profits. Then again, there are some (Bill Gates) who spend their money on useful causes and charities that are slowly helping to change the world around us. But what can the lower class do about such people as mentioned before? I have no idea. I don't know how to change the way things are, because even something such as buying a film or a CD that is anti-establishment or anti-war or anti-anything is still giving money to celebrities or musicians who will make capital off of it at the end of the day. They will still become far richer than me, and I am contributing to their wealth and for what? It is sad that the world is the way it is now, and that few hold so much power over many due to financial or economic reasons. That's the thing that I thought about the most while reading the response. I just got somewhat upset.