As before, I’d like to give a shout-out to a few top-notch posts from this round. I’ve selected for quality and also for coverage: I’m really happy that so many of you wrote about texts we hadn’t yet discussed together! So check out:

• Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams: Lei’s on Freud and dreams nicely mixes anecdote and summary of argument to give a vivid sense of how “dream thoughts” are transformed.
• Lacan’s “mirror stage” essay:
  • Anna H nicely links the productivity of the mirror vis a vis the developing subject.
  • Ayesha gives a bang-up reading of the whole argument, with an emphasis on Lacan’s tricky concept of “meconaissance” or “misrecognition”
• Meltzer’s piece on “unconscious”:
  • James digs into the tricky relationship between Freud’s thought and Lacan’s revision/return.
• Freud on the “fetish”:
  • Lizzie explores the “purgatorial” space of the fetish (and dig the title!)

Two-pronged shout-out here:

1. There’s a useful documentary on the Kanopy interface on the life and work on Fanon. The production is a bit cheesy in the manner of all “dramatizations,” but the talking head work by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is news you can use.
2. More broadly, Kanopy is an amazing and underutilized resource accessible to Hunter students. It’s a big collection of films of all kinds, especially strong in documentaries and educational materials. For me, and for many English major nerds, I suspect, the crown jewel is a big chunk of the Criterion Collection archive of classic films, spanning early cinema (Chaplin, Keaton) to more recent “new classics” from across the globe. It’s a bit of a hassle to sign up, but once you do, you can access via iOS/Android/laptop/Roku or whatever.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to some exemplary posts this time around. I’m really impressed with your hard work and creative thinking and could have picked almost anyone’s work this time. But these stood out for various reasons, so check out:

• Lizzie’s discussion of Marx and “alienation,” which gets at Marx’s attempt to move beyond “idealism” and link the mental and material aspects of “alienation” in labor.
• Lei’s fascinating reading of the video game “What Remains of Edith Finch.” The game features a sequence in which we “play” alienated labor–with disastrous results–in ways that amount to a mode of ideological critique.
• Evelyn and Tenzin took on Benjamin: Tenzin’s post explains the workings of “aura” beautifully and Evelyn’s unpacks Benjamin’s borrowing from Freud to posit an “optical unconscious” that photography and film render available for our analysis.
• Ayesha and James glossed Althusser (and props for tackling this tough text prior to our discussion!): Ayesha emphasized the ideological force of schooling and James, taking a different tack on the same topic, wonders what Althusser would do with the phenomenon of “woke” liberals and leftists in the academy teaching students to question the dominant order, just like we’re doing right now!

I came across this piece in the Times this weekend** and thought about our reading of Benjamin’s famous argument about “aura” and art.

As we’ll explore Monday, Benjamin notes the accelerating trend as of the 1930s towards the “mechanical reproduction” of art: taking the singular thing whose value and effect on viewers was enhanced by its “aura,” its quasi-sacred status by virtue of its being rare, singular, available on to certain people in certain spaces at certain times. You had to go to Delphi to consult the oracle in Greek antiquity; you have to go to the Metropolitan Museum to see Van Gogh today.

Benjamin is thinking about the way the auratic artwork can itself be mechanically reproduced (through engraved repros in the 19thC; on tote bags and posters and coffee mug and websites today). He’s even more interested in “born mechanically reproduced” artforms that started to emerge with the printing press in the 15th century, photography in the mid-19thC and then the phonograph, the cinema, and increasingly cheap and ubiquitous forms of printing of photographs (think newspapers and slick mags) in the early 20th.

So what about Beeple? Beeple is a digital artist who relentlessly generates digital artworks that themselves are made of “born digital” memes, logos, and other flotsam and jetsam of the digital world, reworked into (often very crude) remixes. So, as the article points out, he is part of a long-standing tradition in art invested in the stripping of the aura, so to speak, and posing as an insurgent, democratic force in the rarified art world.

But hold the phone: Beeple has become a very wealthy man through the creating of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) using blockchain technology. Read the article if you’re interested in the details (or just read the piece in the Onion); for our our purposes, the significant thing is that he thereby creates a new aura of sorts, making this synthetic, virtual, digital object something as singular, distant, and inaccessible to the masses as the Mona Lisa. What would Benjamin do with this? It’s fascinating to think about the afterlife of the social, economic, and cultural forces that Benjamin tackles in the 1930s at this much later stage of development, where so much of the particulars is different but some of the basic underpinnings of Benjmin’s analyis still apply.

**Note that all Hunter students can get free digital access to the New York Times through the library. This is basic “equipment for living” as literary theorist Kenneth Burke said of literature: get your subscription and get in the habit of reading it!

I’ll go over this in class today (Thu 11 March) but wanted to share for anyone who misses or wants to review the review:

The Norton’s excerpt from Marx’s German Ideology contains the classic passage comparing “ideology” to a “camera obscura.”  What, you may ask, is a camera obscura?  Here’s an image:

[description from the Cabinet of Wonders blog]: The camera obscura works under the same principles as the pinhole camera: you make a small hole in the side of a box (either a real box or a room-sized box) and the light outside will get in through the hole and project itself onto a piece of paper or a wall, showing you a perfect image of the scene on the outside of the box. Because light travels in a straight line, and because the hole is small, the light on one side of the scene will have to come through at an opposing angle from the light on the other side of the scene.

As we will discuss, the metaphor points at the way cultural representations preserve a kind of fidelity to social reality (i.e., the representation issues from the real thing) but in a distorted manner.  So the work of “ideological criticism” is to re-establish the relationship between reality and representation, a job that’s much more complex in most cases than the simple two-dimensional “flip” in a camera obscura would suggest.

Just wanted to take a minute to thank you all for your excellent work on the third blog post. Literally every single one of you is showing impressive effort, and it’s exciting to see you writing your way towards increasing clarity and master of these often abstract and difficult texts.

As before, I wanted to highlight a couple of authors who really crushed it this time. As always, I’m not ranking here or laying out a template for others to follow, but just shining a light on a couple of the many posts I found insightful:

• Sofia’s post really embodies the ludic (>Latin, ludus, “play” or “game”) aspects of deconstruction as a critical mode with her self-reflexive riff on different ways of reading Johnson reading Melville. Really fun but also really on-point in terms of understanding what’s going on.
• Rich helps us to see de Saussure’s fingerprints all over Barthes’s reading of photographs. Really crystalline example of structuralism from “under the hood.”
• James’s post bravely plunges into the latter part of Johnson’s argument as she examines how Melville has us “judge judgment” through the figure of Vere.

Just wanted to follow up on Sofia’s interesting questions about the use of “mantrap” in Melville’s text. So of course I had to consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), every professor and poet’s favorite toy.

A “mantrap” is just what it sounds like, literally speaking: a trap to catch humans. I would love to research the history of such traps, which is surely bound up in histories of enslavement and exploitation. More to the point, it appears that “mantrap” referred to a conniving woman, especially one who wants to trick a man into marriage. Here we get a clearer sense of how Claggart’s fascination with Budd might have some erotic overtones in ways that critics like Eve Sedgwick and others have explored.

Finally, for those interested in how reading-as-play a la Roland Barthes might actually look, you can see my experiment with Hunter students transforming Billy Budd into a role-playing-game like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a bit hard to “read” as opposed to “playing” it, but that’s part of the point. At any rate, feel free to poke around: basically every player plays a role in (Budd, Claggart) or around (Melville himself, an editor of one of text’s editions, a composer turning it into an opera, a critics interpreting it) the text. Players “move” and interact by writing short texts “in character.”

Check out the obituary of J. Hillis Miller, a towering figure in the “Yale School,” along with Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida (whose work we’ll read soon). Miller and his confreres revolutionized the way we read in ways we’ll explore in some detail through the work of Derrida and Barbara Johnson (one of the first generation of critics trained at Yale by Miller et al.).

Bonus points for anyone who can find the Nietzsche reference in the obit…