Walter Benjamin uses Marxist theory to detail the concept of myth in art and literature, and the author’s need to side with the proletariat as a moralistic fight between capitalism and the proletariat in the context of Russian journalism. Benjamin concludes that the main demand is the writer’s demand to think with respect to the production process. Benjamin argued that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The essay deals with the change of aesthetic values that supposedly occurred as a result of the emergence of means of mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, the fact that works of art can be reproduced in large quantities devaluates their artistic standards. He introduces the concept of aura. Aura is subtle and has an elusive vibe attained by a work of art as a result of its creation and serving as a basis for the feelings of awe and divine inspiration experienced upon exposure to a masterpiece. Since the primary artistic value of the works of art throughout history was cultic in origin – serving to sustain the belief  and being in fear of the supernatural, aura can be considered the essence of any artwork. However, once an object is duplicated, the aura is not transferred to the copy, stripping it of its artistic and/or ritual merits. Benjamin provides several arguments that confirm the recognition and the reaction to the phenomenon in modern times. Specifically, he argues that the tendency of the modern art movements to distance themselves from the mundane and their goal of becoming detached from the society can be considered a form of self-preservation that aims at the same outcome as the early religious organizations.

Butler is interested in this idea of a performative utterance, and uses it to explain how gender works.
What Butler wants to explain about gender is not that it is a performance, but that gender is something that is made by doing. Butlers idea is that gender comes to exist as it exist because it is done a certain way. For example when a women wears a skirt, the skirt is made feminine. This feminization doesn’t happen because women are naturally made to wear skirts or because male anatomy is more conspicuous when a skirt is worn, but because according to Butler the female body already belongs to a specific social category, which gives it the power to assign its prescribed meaning to the things that it does. So when a women wears a skirt, she marks it as feminine, or when a women allows a man to open the door for her that is also a feminine act. These behaviors marked in that way are then actualized as components or symbols to a larger category of femininity, but these things are made symbols of that category but not because of some appointed meaning given to them. But through a body which passes on its larger categorical meaning to the thing that it does. So when a man wears a skirt he does not automatically
make it feminine, as the skirt is still associated with the female body. But he also isn’t denied the power to make the skirt masculine, or to expand the boundary of what is allowed under the label masculinity. His body, just like the female body, has the power to inscribe and can change what the object means. But the object, carrying
a label, also has the ability to affect what his body
means, and here in lies the trouble. The supposedly
solid categories of masculine and feminine are not solid categories which never touch one another. These categories are always being expanded by the way in which people perform, or do their gender. Gender is not a solid state, or an inflexible category, but instead a category that expands and contracts, and runs into other categories. It is not a category that can be made stable and specific. But on the other hand how most people do the category matters a great deal as this determines how much a category can change. So even though some
men might wear skirts, and challenge the supposedly stable categories of masculinity and femininity the fact that mostly women wear skirts prevents the establishment of a new normalized understanding of skirts. To elaborate even further from the book, “the performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender etc. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggest a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance .” (p. 2549-2550)

The Moynihan report focused on the births in the black communities, and their “unfortunate” effect in helping perpetuate cycles of poverty. This story is partially true due to the fact that racist white people in that time and centuries before that consistently ruined the black family dynamic. What’s so disturbing about the report though is that they blamed the condition of the negro families and then and seemingly perpetually “in crisis’” on the gender-inverting role of black women. Spillers rejected the report and labeled it as racist and sexist. She was an African American woman writing on the cause to defend African Americans from a white-dominated culture with features like positive action, the white fight to the suburbs, low quality of education, gangs and slum life supposedly. Her other readings were very intriguing. On her essay about the Moynihan report she mainly talked about the stereotypes and the negative perceptions that were put on the black community.

Saussure had a brilliant mind and he knew he had no good theory and that’s why he never published anything. He even said that he had a dissatisfaction with language theory. All the stuff published in his name was put together from the notes his students took during his lectures. Ferdinand de Saussure emphasized the importance of language along with a synchronic perspective. He was mostly focused on language as a system made up of  relations between the elements. In his theory, the system can be destroyed in detail, it is possible to study it in Saussure’s opinion even though lots would disagree. Example, if you have a huge number of elements to research through time, it’s a lot of work. That’s why he proposed study in language at one point in time, so that you take all data and create a complete picture of one system with all its relations between the elements.

Karl Marx ideologies is very understandable. He focuses on telling us about capitalism. The cruelty of it all. He talks about capitalism in the industry. The alienation of normal citizens working for owners. How normal corporate workers have no say if what goes. Working under horrible conditions to provide for families. Karl Marx wanted to focus on the minds of the working class. The people who don’t have a say in the capitalist world. Marx stated that “the industrial capitalism economy alienated individuals from the work they do, unable to control their own label, which they must sell to another, they lack control and knowledge of themselves and never achieve their full human potential (pg. 648). Basically, what I was pointing out earlier. Marx basically explains how much of a took you are to corporations, but Engels shared the same ideas as him. What is also talked about is what role in society do writers, critics and intellectuals play. Writers have the ability to voice how they feel about society, which in the corporation industry they didn’t have a say to do what they want. It’s basically the same as being a robot. Marx believed that capitalism will end, which obviously it hasn’t. At this point it won’t end until the world is over and destroy itself.

Roman Jakobson disagreed with the Saussure’s notion of a static and arbitrary sign that hacks relevance only synchronically. For Jakobson signs need not to be placed in a polarity of synchrony/ diachrony (p1146). Rather, he envisioned an intermediary synchrony. One that was capable of changing from one form to another. In Jakobson’s seminal chapter seminal chapter from linguistics and poetry, he adds verbal functions, which permits one to note that of all the functions interacting collectively, one of them must always dominate the others. He suggested that the poetic function could deepen the fundamental dichotomy of signs and subjects. He set out to show how the poetic function could operate in a nonparticipating context, one that could have considerable significance in the daily lives of ordinary folk who might not even be aware of a poetic function unveiling itself right in front of them. “Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances.” Jakobson connected the field of the psychomotor disunity of aphasics (those who had extreme difficulty with speaking due to an inability to distinguish one word or object from another) to the realm of the poetic oscillating between metaphor and metonymy. Basically Jakobson is trying to say everything about our daily language in life is poetry. Verbal communication is a form of language and language has to be investigated in all forms (p1147).
The way of speech, in which the addresser sends a message to the addressee. Example, when you’re giving a speech you’re giving out messages in your words for the audience to learn and receive. (P1147).
When you’re listening to the speaker and engaging into the topic you start to form an impression of emotions” (p1148) and in some way this is poetry in itself. The poetry is how you grasp the attention of the reader receiving the message. On page 1151 he quotes “why do you always say Joan and Margery instead of Margery and Joan? It’s not that one is better than the other, saying Joan and Margery sounds smoother.” The poetry in this form of language is the grasping the readers attention. The addressee sends a message to the addressee.

On the reading “On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense” I sort of see some good points on some of his views, even though some things do not make since. Nietzsche thinks concepts are formed from a plurality of a particular experience from which we abstract similarities and omit difference to produce a unifying concept. Nietzsche says that it amazes us when we discover that even the most certain and rigid concepts, such as mathematics is merely the residue of metaphor origination in particular sense experiences. What I realize is that he incorrectly opposed idealism as a subjectively derived truth, rather than an objectively derived truth universal for all people. Rather he regarded as derived from individual perspectives of those living within a world of constant change or everyday change. What then is truth? a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphism’s, in short, a sun of human relations, which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and established (p768). Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained on sensuous force (p768). Apparently he hadn’t noticed the objectively derived, universally true existence of gravity and the sensuous force that is experience as a consequence of denying the truth of its existence.  What led me to see his views more what is biography before  his book, which Nietzsche argues that suffering is necessary for artistic expression (p761). At first, I thought he meant suffering was good for us but as I kept re-reading I tried to change my perception of his way of thinking and try and understand. He does not think suffering is good for us. He thinks that suffering is necessary to human greatness, to great creative achievements. If you want to achieve great things one must be able to tolerate and perhaps even welcome suffering, but that doesn’t mean it does a person good to suffer. Tragedy can exist only so long as we recognize and accept, and affirm the irresolvable contradiction between our hopes and how the world is (p761). He also states that that “to have the strength to love life even though suffering is inevitable (p762).